Clubhusband

The year 2005 marked the 100th anniversary of Bob Wills’s birth, an occasion this four-CD box set celebrates in grand style. There’s a sampling of Wills’s earliest recordings; a full helping from his heyday, 1935-47; and a well-considered overview of his still-vital music through the ‘50s and ‘60s -- culminating in four tracks from the 1973 album For the Last Time, which represented the final reunion of Wills, then disabled by a stroke, and ten of his former Playboys. Wills never thought of himself as a country artist, and he made sure the Playboys were virtually unclassifiable as anything but one hell of a band. Western-flavored swing, blues (Bessie Smith was a Wills favorite, and he did her proud in 1938 with a solid treatment of “Down Hearted Blues”); pop (a rich component of the Wills repertoire, with striking adaptations of Tommy Dorsey’s take on the classical favorite “Liebestraum” and the Ray Noble Orchestra’s 1934 hit “Who Walks In when I Walk Out,” being among the most enduring performances in the Wills canon); traditional country (he put songwriter Cindy Walker on the map with “Cherokee Maiden,” “Dusty Skies,” and “Sugar Moon”); and jazz (clearly inspired by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings) -- all were part of the Playboys’ wide-ranging repertoire. A stern taskmaster, Wills drew to his ranks some of the most gifted musicians of his time: giants such as vocalist-songwriter Tommy Duncan, steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe, guitarists Eldon Shamblin and Herman Arnspiger, piano virtuosos Al Stricklin and Millard Kelso, fiddlers Jesse Ashlock and Johnny Gimble, bassist Joe Ferguson and drummer Smoky Dacus, among others, who could bring home a formal arrangement in the studio and improvise with breathtaking facility in live settings (this box set includes no live recordings, however). Wills himself, fiddler, songwriter, singer, and bandleader, lorded over it all, with a joie de vivre that remains as infectious as it is distinctive. Wills and the Playboys’ classics are American standards, and they’re all here -- “New San Antonio Rose,” “Faded Love,” “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” “Right or Wrong,” “Time Changes Everything,” “Steel Guitar Rag,” et al. -- in this authoritatively annotated collection. In vision, spirit, and execution, what Wills and his Playboys wrought in their heyday stands with the greatest music of the 20th century, as these four discs attest.