I grew up with a milder form of rock music than I heard the other day booming from a car when I pulled into an Iola convenience store.
Buddy Holly was my favorite, along with a long list of one-hit wonders. Nothing gets me more nostalgic than a ballad from the 1950s. I can close my eyes and drift back when the Platters croon “Only You.”
I also have a fondness for big bands and old-style Western music, which prompted me to snatch up a book about Bob Wills at a yard sale, a bargain at a quarter.
Rosetta, Wills’ daughter who happened to live in Fort Scott for a while, wrote the book. I would have preferred it dig a little deeper into his life, rather than ramble at times about his family from several marriages, but there was enough about the “King of Western Swing” to keep me reading.
Wills grew up in Turkey, Texas, not too far south of Amarillo and north of Lubbock, where Holly and his Crickets started out as a garage band.
The fiddle was Wills’ choice of instruments, and many think he was as good as it gets when it came to getting everyone in a hall on their feet and dancing. He added horns when most thought that was crossing the line with a Western band — and then there was his hollering.
Anyone who ever heard Wills and his Texas Playboys will recall his impromptu commentaries, including when he implored Leon McAufille, on steel guitar: “Ah ha, take it away Leon!”
Many folks around here heard Wills live, along with many who followed his musical course, especially at a popular stop in Tulsa, Cain’s Ballroom.
One of his contemporaries, Hank Thompson, once played a fundraiser in Iola for the college’s athletic teams, though it was toward the end of his career and didn’t draw the crowd it would have years earlier.
Come to think of it, Hank was a popular first name for Western musicians of those times. Hank Snow and Hank Williams, including junior, were cut from the same cloth.
But, Bob Wills was the king, especially when he amped up his rendition of “San Antonio Rose.”
