Western Swing: December 2020 Archives

In 1966 and 1967, a trio of researchers, Glenn White, Bob Healy, and Bob Pinson, published a series of articles in Record Research: The Magazine of Record Information and Statistics, covering the life and career of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. The introduction to this four-part series mentioned that the effort had begun in 1959. A refined version of the discography, updated to include Bob's recording sessions with Kapp Records, the recording session at Merle Haggard's housewarming, and "For the Last Time," was included as an appendix in San Antonio Rose, Charles Townsend's biography of Bob Wills. The San Antonio Rose version, however, does not include the details about the Tiffany recordings that you'll find here.

These issues are now available on the Internet Archive:

Record Research 79: October 1966: Part 1 covers Bob Wills's biography and early career through the end of World War II, with the list of movies Bob and his band appeared in, the list of their appearances on Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS), photos in their songbooks.

Record Research 80: November 1966: Part 2 lists the music on the official Tiffany Transcriptions discs, as well as some unissued songs on the legendary "bus driver tapes"; traces the changes in personnel over the course of the late '40s and 1950s, based on recordings of dances and air-shots. There is tantalizing mention of 25 hours of KVOO air-shots recorded by Ed Wilson of Memphis, Texas (not far from Bob's hometown of Turkey) in 1940. This was the lineup that recorded "New San Antonio Rose"; what I would give for a time machine to hear them live!

Tom Diamant's Tiffany Transcriptions website has a more detailed discography session by session. Diamant and Jeff Alexson were the founders of Kaleidoscope Records which issued these wonderful recordings commercially for the first time in the 1980s. He has kindly provided a page with links to YouTube versions of all the Tiffany Transcriptions tracks issued by Kaleidoscope.

Record Research 81: January 1967: Part 3 lists some additional sidemen who were known or thought to have been in the Texas Playboys, lists the personnel for the bands of Johnnie Lee Wills, Luke Wills, and Billy Jack Wills, and has an intriguing paragraph about the Bob Wills's sale of the Texas Playboys in 1964:

In August, 1964, Bob sold the rights to THE TEXAS PLAYBOYS to Carl Johnson of Ft. Worth. Disagreements resulted in a separation, and Bob formed a new band without the Texas Playboy monicker. The organization is now known as BOB WILLS AND HIS BOYS. Leon Rausch took over the Texas Playboys.

Record Research 82: February 1967: Part 4 presents the discography of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys for Columbia, MGM, Decca, Liberty, and Longhorn, with personnel for each session, mentioning at the end that Bob recorded for Kapp Records in 1966.

Record Research, which was founded by Leonard Kunstadt and published from 1955 to 1995, contains the sort of discographical information that these days is accumulated on blogs or wikis. (For example, the excellent and ongong Praguefrank's Country Music Discographies. Here's the original Praguefrank discography site.) The Internet Archive has the entire forty-year print run of Record Research available online. It's fascinating to browse as an example of self-publication by a passionate amateur, using a typewriter and scissors and paste to assemble a magazine. Here is the very first issue, from February 1955, which included a Eubie Blake discography, an article about Edison cylinders, and a commitment to be "a magazine built on discographical craftsmanship." The final issue, No. 253/254, was published in January 1995, using the same format, and included the third part of a series on Daugherty, Oklahoma-born Big Band singer Kay Starr.

I found this because I was curious about the fiddlers on the Eldon Shamblin 1979 solo album Guitar Genius. There are some Stephane Grappelli-inspired licks on the album. I knew Curly Lewis from the Johnnie Lee Wills band and that he was an admirer of Grappelli's jazz fiddle work, but I hadn't heard of Gary Hutton, and when I searched for his name, one of the Record Research issues containing the aforementioned Bob Wills discography mentioned Hutton as a possible Bob Wills sideman.