Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys & Bessie Smith

While he may not have invented Western swing (Milton Brown, Leon Selph, Ted Daffan, and Bill Boyd deserve some credit), Bob Wills defined the genre. Take fiddle-based old-time string-band music from the 1920s and '30s, move it to a city such as Tulsa or Fort Worth, add jazz, blues, pop, and sacred music, back it with strings and horns played by a dozen or so musicians, add an electric steel guitar along the way, and you have Western swing. And when you talk Western swing, you start with Bob Wills. Though the sound began in the 1930s, the '40s proved its heyday, with Bob Wills ...