Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys – Legends Of Country Music (4-cd Box)

You’d think that when it comes to Bob Wills’ music, there’d be no surprises left. Oh, sure, somebody’s bound to turn up another live set somewhere along the way, or something like that. But the most important — and most typical — Wills material is already out there. And once you’ve gotten the Bear Family treatment, as he has, there’s nothing left for the die-hard fan to discover.

But discoveries are to be made on this four-disc box just the same. For starters, the sound quality is on a par with that of the Bear Family boxes (each of which is priced in the oh-well-I-didn’t-want-to-eat-this-month-anyhow range). And that makes a difference. Domestic Wills reissues before this were such that you heard mainly that warm, cacophonous band sound — a thing of wonder in itself, of course — and some great soloists.

But the sound here has such clarity and fullness that you hear, in addition to the unified band sound, each individual instrument. On “Who Walks In When I Walk Out”, the interplay in the ensemble between Jesse Ashlock’s fiddle, Leon McAuliffe’s guitar and Al Stricklin’s piano is clear before saxman Zeb McNally and McAuliffe and Stricklin ever take their solos. When McAuliffe on steel and Eldon Shamblin on lead play together, as on “Bob Wills Special” and the ringing, shimmering “Twin Guitar Special”, you can hear the full depth and richness of their harmonies.

Then there are the discoveries new fans will make that old fans might not have noticed before (or if they did, that they will rediscover with delight). For example, that jazzy fiddler Jesse Ashlock — who was with the Texas Playboys on their very first September 1935 sessions, missed the early ’40s, and was back on board as late as 1946 — also turned into an evocative country-pop songwriter with the likes of “My Life’s Been A Pleasure”, “The Kind of Love I Can’t Forget”, and “Still Water Runs The Deepest”. (These men belong to an era when it wouldn’t even occur to anyone that going pop was a “sellout,” and when it was possible for “countrypolitan” to also sound funky.)

Or that the crushing rhythm work and monstrous solos postwar electric guitarist Junior Barnard takes on “Brain Cloudy Blues”, “Bob Wills Boogie” and “Fat Boy Rag” should have gotten him recognized as one of the progenitors of rock guitar. Or that other, even more obscure Wills sidemen such as trumpeter Tubby Lewis (on “Big Beaver”) or postwar pianist Skeeter Elkin (on “Cadillac In Model ‘A'”) are just as worthy of a close re-examination.

Wills has always been noted for the incredible diversity of his music — for the way he combined traditional and contemporary (at the time) country with jazz from small Dixieland combos to big swing bands, pop from vocalists like Gene Austin to dance orchestras, blues, jug bands and hokum, black and white gospel, mariachi, polka, you name it, to create dance music that kept southwestern ballrooms hopping.

But when you hear it all in one place, it becomes even more impressive. So is the way he took specific songs from all those genres and bent them to his own will. In the earliest sessions, he favored blues tunes. “Osage Stomp” transforms the Memphis Jug Band’s “Rukus Juice And Chitlin” into a little big-band stomp, just like the title says; the rhythm workout “Get With It” puts new lyrics from vocalist Tommy Duncan to the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Jazz Fiddler”; the same group’s “Sittin’ On Top Of The World” remains, in Wills’ hands, a straight-up blues. There’s faithful but singular interpretations of Chippie Hill’s version of “Trouble In Mind”, Memphis Minnie’s “What’s The Matter With The Mill”, Bessie Smith’s “Down Hearted Blues”, and Georgia White’s “Black Rider”, among others.

But he gave old songs new faces no matter where they originated. Traditional songs such as “The Girl I Left Behind Me” become wailing, big-band swing; the original Wills fiddle tune “Waltz In D” is reshaped into the country-jazz steel guitar standard “Texas Playboy Rag” for Noel Boggs; Texas fiddle favorite “Gone Indian” is transformed into the ever-popular Wills ditty “Stay A Little Longer”; and the traditional fiddle tune “Darling Nellie Gray” morphs into the postwar pop standard “Faded Love”. Wills writes “Steel Guitar Stomp” as a showcase for McAuliffe and then, three years later, gets arranging whiz Shamblin to expand it into the big-band tornado “Big Beaver”. Later, in the much-maligned postwar years — which did go bad for Wills, even if they didn’t start that way — country songs such as “Ida Red Likes The Boogie” adapt the shuffling R&B of Louis Jordan.

And just look at what Wills could do with his own material. Living in New Mexico in 1927, he wrote the catchy instrumental “Spanish Two Step”. His 1935 recording of it sold so well that his A&R man Uncle Art Satherley asked him in late ’38 to come up with something in the same vein. Wills had the band play the same song “backwards,” starting in D instead of A, and the result was the even bigger hit “San Antonio Rose”.

That compelled Irving Berlin’s publishing company to contract Wills to write a vocal version, which he did with his trumpet player Everett Stover. Berlin’s writers then bastardized Bob’s song into yet another silly little commercial cowboy tune and the bandleader went to his lawyers. Berlin returned to the original lyrics and the results were the fiddle-free “New San Antonio Rose”, which Tommy Duncan sang over a hard-swinging big band. Wills got his hit from the song, and so did Bing Crosby.

And then, doubtless hoping to recapture that magic early in 1945, Wills came almost full circle by cutting “New Spanish Two Step”, again with Duncan on vocals, and featuring Boggs on steel and Jimmy Wyble on guitar. The single topped Billboard’s folk (as it was then called) chart for 18 weeks. Though all four of these records echo one another, each also stands on its own, from the Mexican flavors of “Spanish Two Step” to the uptown “New San Antonio Rose”.

All American music is eclectic, of course, but nobody before or since took it to the extremes Bob Wills did and made it mainstream. Listening to his best efforts, it’s sometimes still hard to believe that music this resourceful, and this unlikely, was not only being released, but was dominating various charts, in that time and place. There are boxes offering more Wills, and there are boxes priced cheaper — but taking into account the full range of the 105 tracks included as well as the attention that went into the sound and packaging, this is the one no music fan of any kind should be without.