Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys | Legends of Country Music: Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys (Legacy)

Legends should gladden country connoisseurs with its extraordinary breadth. Over four discs and 105 tracks, the compilation traces Wills' professional career from 1932, to his final recording in Dallas on December 3, 1973.

 

Of all the subgenres of country music, perhaps none has dated as poorly as Western swing, the New Deal amalgam of jazz and the string band. In that respect, Legends of Country Music: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys constitutes a retrospective at once saddening and gladdening.

It's saddening to the extent that Wills' bucolic big banditry sounds positively atavistic in the countrypolitan-on-steroids present, even to a listener who loathes latter-day Billy Sherrilloid abominations like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. Although Hank Williams Jr. may once have proclaimed that "Bob Wills is still the king," although no less an artist than Merle Haggard may have recorded A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World in 1970, and although Ray Benson's Asleep at the Wheel may have carried the musical torch since then, Western swing today enjoys no standard-bearer with a profile even vaguely as high as that of (say) Alison Krauss in the related, slightly younger form of bluegrass.

That said, Legends (despite its ungainly full title) should gladden country connoisseurs with its extraordinary breadth. Over four discs and 105 tracks, the compilation traces Wills' professional career from 1932, near its dawn, to his final recording in Dallas on December 3, 1973, on the night of which he suffered a (second) massive stroke that left him comatose till his death on May 15, 1975. It necessarily showcases Wills' fiddle, than which perhaps no more sprightly an instrument ever existed. Reflecting Wills' role as a genre innovator-his reportedly ranked as the first country band to include a drummer-Legends also features the work of a platoon of Texas Playboys on instruments as unlikely as the clarinet, saxophone, trombone, and trumpet. (Such orchestral eclecticism might otherwise position Western swing as the country subgenre most likely to interest country haters, but for the fact that such haters hilariously seem to regard the Stratocaster as the sonic alpha and omega of Western Civilization.)

Predictably, on its nearly five hours of music, this monumental Columbia/Legacy compilation includes such Wills standards as "Bubbles in My Beer," "Ida Red Likes the Boogie," "New San Antonio Rose," and "New Spanish Two Step," along with other numbers that filled dance floors in Texas, in Oklahoma, and then throughout the nation a decade before and after World War II. It also perforce includes Wills' delightful spoken orchestration as a bandleader-no baton brigadier, he-during which, again and again, he exclaims, "Aaah-ha!" In that respect, irrespective of changing tastes, Wills' jubilation at making music echoes down the decades, and Legends lovingly presents that jubilation once more for the delectation of contemporary listeners whose attention span extends past last Tuesday.