BOB WILLS AND HIS TEXAS PLAYBOYS, Sunday Times, November 22, 1998

You'd think the number of forgotten talents to dig up, canonise and induct into the music hall of fame would be finite. The 1990s have seen the back catalogues of Gram Parsons, Nick Drake and Sandy Denny annotated and anthologised. By now there's a familiar pattern to these critical resurrections. Stage one involves the CD reissues, and a chunky hardback biography. Stage two sees our abandoned Lazarus-like hero made the subject of a tribute album by various hip young alternative artists. And stage three sees the bloke from the Lemonheads and/or the woman from Throwing Muses citing said talent as their key influence, before the media looks for a fresh corpse to re-animate. But despite this, nobody could have foreseen the current flurry of interest surrounding the podgy Texan drunkard Bob Wills, the almost undisputed King of the Western Swing, and his legacy of literally hundreds of hissy two-and-a-half-minute tunes.

The country music critic Tad Richards called Wills's blend of country and big band jazz "the first fusion, the first crossover", but it accurately reflects the cross-pollinated environment he grew up in. Born in east Texas in 1905 to a poor farming family, most of whom played the fiddle, Wills learned blues songs from the cotton pickers he worked alongside, heard jazz horns blowing across the fields from his black neighbours, and imbibed a weird hybrid of the music of his friends and family's historic homelands - German polkas, Mexican waltzes and Scottish folk - at Texan square dances. By his teens, young Bob was stepping in for his fiddle-playing father when he was too drunk to perform with his band, and at 16 he headed east on a freight train, winning fiddle-playing competitions on a borrowed instrument in between stints as a barber, his love of music and its attendant hard living at odds with a desire to train as a preacher.

Last year, with Jonathan Cape's publication of Lone Star Swing, by the Somerset Maugham award-winning writer Duncan McLean, Wills was well on the way to fulfilling the first stage of becoming a cult figure. Having been bewitched by a Bob Wills record he found in an Edinburgh junkshop, McLean left his native Orkney to drive around Texas with money from his award's travel bursary, tracking down various bewildered nonagenarian associates of Wills. The shaky pickers and players recalled the musical scene in which they cut their teeth with varying, and endearingly rendered, degrees of clarity.

In the 1920s and 1930s music and commerce walked unashamedly hand in hand, Wills playing with the Aladdin Laddies for a radio show sponsored by the Aladdin Lamp Company, and flogging flour for the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company as one of the fabulously named Light Crust Doughboys. Today the charts ring to the sounds of the Pepsi Max Spice Girls in all but name, and Wills should be remembered as a commercial innovator if nothing else, eventually buying his own radio slots and selling them to the highest-bidding sponsor.

His band, the Texas Playboys, formed from Doughboys renegades, played short tunes to maximise the profits of juke joints where floozies charged partying field hands by the dance. Wills would nevertheless force half a dozen or so hot jazz solos in between the vocals of an
ever-changing string of handsome crooners, conducting a band often 15 strong with magical swings of his bow. By the 1940s he was a household name.

Even so, when expatriate Welsh musician Jon Langford chanced upon a secondhand Bob Wills album in a Chicago thrift store some years back he had no idea who Wills was, or that he had just made a life-changing purchase. Last week saw the release of Bloodshot Records' The Pine Valley Cosmonauts Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills, for which Langford assembled a group of Chicago roots rock and post-punk luminaries to render lovingly anew all Wills's greatest hits. Steel Guitar Rag affirms the Playboys' genuinely innovative use of early guitar amplification; Robbie Fulks' vocal on Across the Alley from the Alamo really swings; and Brett Sparks, of the alternative-country art-school weirdos the Handsome Family, supplies suitably skewed singing on Roly Poly, a Wills original about an indiscriminate obese child, "Daddy's little fatty", who "eats everything from soup to hay". Stage two of Wills's return is complete.

Langford's career, meanwhile, has taken him from Leeds proto-punks the Mekons in 1977 to his Bob Wills album on a trajectory of unnerving synchronicities. Splitting at the end of the 1970s, disillusioned with trying to ply their wares in an increasingly thuggish marketplace, the Mekons re-emerged in the mid-1980s experimenting, initially uneasily, with roots musics, and eventually emigrating to America, where the Mekons and the Waco Brothers, Langford's country-rock supergroup side project, are held in the same esteem as the Clash.

"A prophet is without honour in his own country," he laughs, without a trace of bitterness. Oddly, when he happened upon McLean's book, Langford e-mailed him to chat online about Wills, only to find that the previous day McLean had been at an Inverness gallery, viewing an exhibition of Langford's western-style etchings.

Attempting to analyse the lure of Bob Wills, Langford admits some confusion. "It's weird. Bob Wills didn't die young and he didn't leave a particularly beautiful corpse, but he and the band would come off three months' tour and then record 40 songs in a day, which I suppose appeals to me as an aging punk rocker. But I like the fact that he was a traditional fiddle player experimenting with swing music. He was completely open to anything. And he was an amazing character. Onstage the band were trying to impress him, not the audience, and he'd get furious if anyone played the same solo twice."

But maybe Wills won't make stage three of the mythologisation process, all the same. The facts of his life are too well documented, and he's no shadowy Robert Johnson figure, although accounts can be contradictory. In her book Bob Wills Remembered, Rosetta Wills, a daughter by one of his four marriages, speaks of Wills's unpredictable generosity, and of how he kept a horse for each of the Texas Playboys at his ranch, even though many of them couldn't even ride. However, when Duncan McLean mentioned Wills to Lucille Kleypas,
wife of one-time Playboys pianist Walt Kleypas, she responded with the damning indictment: "Bob Wills? Bob Wills was a big fat slob!"

There's already a surfeit of Bob Wills on CD, and Fremaux Records' Western Swing 1928-1944 is a good introduction to the overall scene. Once you shake your late 20th-century suspicions, there's an undeniable power to this music, but be warned of its addictive quality. McLean himself was unavailable for comment for this piece.
"He's gone to Texas again," said his publisher.