Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a deal on the best Western Swing ever!, April 14, 2004
This is another one of those incredible deals floating around the Internet that sounds simply too good to be true: a four CD box set of the incredible Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys -- 109 tracks in all -- for $21.99? You're putting me on! Well, it's all true. These four CDs contain superb quality versions of all the songs; I've never heard Bob Wills sound so clear and clean. The CDs present his musical career from 1932 to 1948, a treasure trove of Western Swing of all varieties, in roughly chronological order. The four CDs come in a sturdy library case jacket, not some cheap cardboard sleeve, and also come with a beautiful 52-page booklet loaded with pictures, a full history of the band, and detailed personnel and session date information for every piece on the four CDs.And just what kind of music did Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys give us? A good question. Wills's music is neither straight country, nor straight jazz, but a wonderful gumbo mix of nearly everything: folk, blues, ragtime, jazz, Dixieland, country, gospel. But above everything else, it swings! And so the label "Western Swing" stuck. Bob Wills took his love of jazz and blues he had learned from black musicians, and applied the instruments of country folk to it: fiddles, banjos, and especially the distinctive sounds of the steel guitar. Even people who don't like modern country music (and I'm one of those people) will find it hard to resist the hard swingin' power of Bob Wills and those crazy Playboys of his. Fans of big band swing of the era will go nuts over Bob Will's down home Texas interpretation of their favorite music. Wills had some incredible musicians in his stable, such as singer Tommy Duncan, banjoist Johnny Lee Wills (Bob Wills's younger brother), and piano player Al Stricklin, but most importantly he had steel guitar genius Leon McAuliffe, whose tune "Steel Guitar Rag" is one of the masterpieces from the Texas Playboys. Wills himself played the fiddle and sung a few lead vocals, such as the delightful "Sugar Blues," but his strongest force in the band was as the "caller," a constant voice that propels the band on and teases the singer and the soloists with encouragement ("All right, cut it down boy, cut it down! That's telling `em! Take it away Mr. Leon!") The first two tracks on this collection are actually by the immediate predecessors to the Texas Playboys, The Fort Worth Doughboys. With the third track, "Osage Stomp," The Texas Playboys proper tear into the music and never stop. The variety of music you'll hear over the four CD is stunning. The band stomps and fiddles up a storm on "Get with It," "Who Walks out When I Walk In," "Playboy Stomp," "Texas Playboy Rag," "That's What I Like about the South," and "Roly Poly." They get very jazzy and big band with "Big Beaver," "New San Antonio Rose" (Wills's biggest hit), "I'm a Ding Dong Daddy," "Dinah," "Fan It" (my personal favorite piece), "A Little Bit of Boogie," and "Crazy Rhythm." And there are some country novelties as well, like "Take Me Back to Tulsa," "Stay a Little Longer," "Frankie Jean," and the beautiful "Along the Navajo Trail." My pick for the most unusual piece is the twin-female vocal of "Hawaiian War Chant." There's so much variety here that everyone is bound to find something they love, and probably many surprises as well. And at this price, it's easy to take the chance.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Come in, Tommy...", January 5, 2006
This boxed set is amazing for the sheer volume of wonderful music it proffers at a fraction of what one would expect to pay for it. Concentrating on the early years, it presents Bob Wills at the dawn of his recording career and continues through the height of his creativity. This is the cream of early Bob Wills, and contains about 60% of his very best material (I am long of the opinion that Bob Wills never made a bad record in his life, and he continued to be productive through his so-called "lean years" of the 1950's, 1960's and beyond). But these tracks are the classics that most fans cherish above all.
Tommy Duncan, Wills' favorite featured vocalist, appears here on many sides, including Time Changes Everything (my personal Bob Wills favorite) and many others. Besides the early Columbia sides, there are examples of his Decca years and other smaller labels. A few of my own favorites include My Little Cherokee Maiden (close runner-up to Time Changes Everything as my favorite Bob Wills record) Sunbonnet Sue (recorded with Milton Brown and His Brownies before Bob formed the Playboys) Maiden's Prayer, Steel Guitar Rag, Basin Street Blues, San Antonio Rose, Silver Bells, Lone Star Rag (an overlooked masterpiece, and one of the catchiest instrumental tunes you've ever heard), Take Me Back To Tulsa, Miss Molly, My Confession, Roly Poly, Hawaiian War Chant, Sugar Moon, Bubbles In My Beer, Deep Water, Faded Love (which Bob wrote and Patsy Cline had a monster hit with) and I Laugh When I Think How I Cried Over You (what a great title!).
For anyone who doesn't know, Bob Wills was a fiddle player who played his first professional gig as a young boy, substituting for his father at a barn dance. Although he grew up around Western music, the Wills family lived in a poor area where there were many black families, and very early he was exposed to and grew to love the Blues and other forms of traditional African-American music. Legend has it that he once rode fifty miles on horseback to attend a Bessie Smith recital, and was the only white person in the audience. He was one of the founding members of Milton Brown and His Brownies, the band credited with creating the style of music now known as Western Swing. When he started his own band, the Texas Playboys, he took a cue from Count Basie and included Brass, Horns and rhythm instruments, and if he couldn't claim to actually invent Western Swing, he certainly perfected it. In the 1940's he was one of the highest paid bandleaders in the US.
Bob was most famous for his "calls" or "hollers". When the band got hot, he would frequently holler "Ahhhhh-hahhhh" or prod them along with such exclamations as "Take it away, Leon" or "Here's that old piano pounder". Or, if the band was playing below his expectations, he would shout, "Johnny in key, please" or virtually anything else that came into his mind.
For many years during the height of his popularity, Bob and his music were rejected by the orthodox country music establishment for being too "jazzy" and ignored by the jazz world for being too "hillbilly". Western Swing is a blend of jazz and western music - it is primarily dance music, with a strong emphasis on vocals (like country), but it also includes jazz instruments like saxophone and trumpets. What makes it most unique are instruments that are traditionally associated with country music (like fiddles and steel guitars), being employed in a "swing" or jazz fashion. Any performance by Bob Wills Texas Playboys incorporates spotlight solos, improvisation and other musical trademarks generally associated with jazz. In other words, his band and his music are totally unique.
Fortunately, there was a revival of interest in Bob Wills and his music which started in the 1960's and continues to this day. After his death in 1974, there was an explosion of new Western Swing bands, with young admirers anxious to copy the Bob Wills sound and keep Western Swing alive. Even country music has finally paid him his due, for today Bob Wills is proudly embraced and revered in country circles as a pioneer and a true original. He is now acknowledged as one of the first to incorporate African American rhythm and Jazz into country music, and his influence has been acknowledged by such diverse artists as Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and even Elvis Costello.
If you are not familiar with Bob Wills, you can't go wrong with this set as an introduction, especially at this price.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
King of western swing, March 29, 2004
Asleep at the wheel have kept Bob's music alive by recording two tribute albums with star-studded guest lists, both of which I've already reviewed. Patsy Cline, Ray Price and Willie Nelson are among many country singers who have had hits with covers of his songs. Furthermore, Waylon Jennings famously sang about Bob Wills, who may have still been king when Waylon recorded that song in the seventies, but I wonder how many young people these days - even in Texas - know or care whom Bob Wills is. This collection makes it very clear.Like so many greats from whatever era, Bob's music had a variety of influences. In his case, there were the swing band that dominated the pop charts of the thirties and the primitive country music, just escaping from its folk roots. The fusion of these two styles might have been called country swing but was actually called western swing and that's the name that stuck. This collection covers the period 1935 to 1950, although it begins with a couple of Milton Brown tracks from 1932, when Bob was a member of Milton's band. It took a while for Bob to really hit his stride, but he wrote several classic songs. Here, you can find his original versions of San Antonio Rose, Stay a little longer, Cotton eyed Joe (an unlikely number one UK hit for Swedish disco group Rednex), Sugar moon, Bubbles in my beer, Deep water, Don't be ashamed of your age (covered as a duet by Ernest Tubb and Red Foley) and Faded love (which Patsy Cline made her own - most people think Patsy's version is the original - of course, it isn't). As ever with Proper boxed sets, the sound quality is brilliant and the liner notes extensive. If you only buy one Bob Wills collection, buy this one.
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Interact With Your Music: Discover, listen to, and buy new music, all from the pages of SPIN's digital edition, free to Amazon customers.
~ Willie Nelson
~ Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys
~ Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys
~ Ernest Tubb
~ Hank Williams Sr.
See all 26 tracks on this disc
by Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys 
