Wills, Bob (1905–1975)

US country fiddle player and composer. As leader of the band known from 1934 as Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Wills became a pioneer of Western swing and a big influence on US popular music. His songs include ‘San Antonio Rose’ (1938). He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

Born in Kosse, Texas, Wills began playing in 1920 and went on to do local radio shows. His band was named and renamed after the commercial sponsor's product (for a time they were the Light Crust Doughboys, for example). Their repertory drew on blues, popular ballads, and jazz, as well as country, with much original material.

The line-up of the band varied, encompassing up to 22 musicians, including several fiddles, a steel guitar, a mandolin, a vocalist, and horns. Moving from Texas, they made their finest recordings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1934–42. Tommy Duncan was the vocalist from 1932 to the early 1950s. In the 1940s, highly popular in the USA, they appeared in a number of films. Their star waned in the 1950s but Wills lived to see the beginning of a Western swing revival.