Billy Jack Wills And His Western Swing Band – Self-Titled
While Billy Jack Wills may not be nearly as well-known as brothers Bob and Johnnie Lee, he and his short-lived band created some of the most exciting and innovative Western swing ever recorded.
The youngest of the Wills brothers, Billy Jack got his start playing in his older brothers’ bands — first for Johnnie Lee in the early ’40s, later with the Texas Playboys in the mid-’40s. Billy Jack played both drums and bass as needed for Bob, along with singing lead on a few songs and writing some others, most notably one of country music’s most enduring standards, “Faded Love”.
After Bob moved his main base of operations from Sacramento, California, to Oklahoma City in 1949, Wills mandolin player Tiny Moore came up with the idea of keeping a Wills presence in Sacramento at Bob’s famed Wills Point ballroom — specifically, a band fronted by Bob’s younger brother, Billy Jack. The band subsequently formed by Moore and Billy Jack evolved into one of Western swing’s most progressive ensembles.
Evidence of the band’s greatness can be found on this collection of radio transcriptions, recorded for Sacramento’s KFBK in the early ’50s. Two albums of the transcriptions were first issued on vinyl in 1982 to critical acclaim by the now-defunct San Francisco label Western Records. Billy Jack Wills and His Western Swing Band features all 16 tracks on the first Western album, plus three others. (Joaquin plans to reissue the follow-up album of Wills transcriptions, Crazy, Man Crazy!, in the spring of ’97.)
Billy Jack’s band made some commercial recordings in the early ’50s for 4-Star, and later for MGM, but it’s the radio transcriptions that show the band at its peak. By the time the transcriptions were made, the group had evolved into a small-combo swing band of formidable talent, with Wills on drums and occasional vocals, Moore on electric mandolin or fiddle and lead vocals, a young Vance Terry (later to play with Jimmie Rivers’ band) on steel guitar, Dick McComb (the group’s sole hornman) on trumpet and occasional bass, Kenny Lowery on guitar, and Cotton Roberts on bass and fiddle.
For complexity and sheer excitement, they were hard to beat. The band’s ensemble work, arranged by Moore, was tight and sophisticated; Moore and Wills were capable, bluesy vocalists; Terry was a Herb Remington disciple capable of complex solos of unerring dynamic subtlety; McComb’s blowing was brash and uninhibited; and Moore spiced the pot with some intricate bebop figures on mandolin.
The transcriptions were made to be played on the band’s KFBK radio show when they were out on tour, but there’s nothing slapdash about them. They feature an eclectic assortment of material that was a more modern mix of the music played by older brother Bob; unlike the music of the Texas Playboys, 1940s R&B and jump blues were a regular part of Billy Jack’s repertoire. Billy Jack loved B.B. King and other modern bluesmen, and some of the most exciting moments on this reissue are the band’s versions of Willie Mabon’s “I Don’t Know” and Ruth Brown’s “Teardrops From My Eyes”. The band also approaches rock ‘n’ roll on their aggressive covers of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Mr. Cotton Picker” and “Rock City Boogie”.
Billy Jack’s band also could swing with the best of them, as they demonstrate on sizzling versions of “Dipsy Doodle”, “Air Mail Special”, “Woodchopper’s Ball”, “C Jam Blues” and “Caravan”. Other highlights abound, from the band’s assured interpretation of the Dixieland standard “Basin Street Blues” to “Tuxedo Junction”, which Terry enlivens with some sophisticated steel playing.
But Billy Jack’s band was short-lived. Bob moved back to Sacramento and took over Billy Jack’s band after disbanding the Playboys. Under Bob’s more conservative leadership, the band failed to play with the same fire and inventiveness that characterized their work with Billy Jack.
As this reissue shows (more clearly than ever, thanks to excellent remastering, along with expanded liner notes from country authority Rich Kienzle), Billy Jack Wills should be considered much more than a footnote in the music careers of his older brothers. He was an important artist in his own right who played Western swing with the complexity of jazz, the emotion of blues, and the aggression of rock ‘n’ roll.