You don't know me, but you don't like me
You say you care less how I feel
How many of you that sit and judge me
Ever walked the streets of Bakersfield?
- Buck Owens from Streets Of Bakersfield
I intended to stay in Africa one more week, but I’m calling an audible.
Last week, I read Phil Freeman’s excellent article The Bakersfield Sound. At his mention of Bob Wills my mind went into free association. Oddly enough, the first person that came to mind was a supervisor I worked with at Abbott Labs in North Chicago. I can’t recall his name now, but he introduced me to country music - or as he would say, “real” country music. He mentioned Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and a local Bakersfield cat with a lot of energy named Ludeke (but that’s a different story altogether). Well, I didn’t know any better, but since he was from Oklahoma, I figured he knew. So I’d spend some time listening to those guys, and I’m glad I did.
Freeman’s description of the “Bakersfield Sound” and how it came about interested me. He wrote:
The Bakersfield sound, as its name suggests, developed in California. The performers who brought it to national attention, like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, came up in the 1950s and early 1960s, but its roots go back to the 1930s and 1940s, when economic migrants from Oklahoma, Texas and the “dust bowl” came to California seeking farm work or jobs in the oil fields. Legendary “western swing” bandleader Bob Wills, whose Texas Playboys combined country songwriting and hillbilly fiddling with a jazz rhythm indebted to Count Basie, was in fact based in California after World War II. Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry didn’t allow performers to use drums onstage, but out in Bakersfield, the hard-drinking farmhands and oil patch workers wanted to hear a backbeat.
While reading this, three more things came to my mind: Bob Wills’ lesser-known brother Johnnie Lee Wills; Waylon Jennings’ song Bob Wills Is Still the King, which I played my harp along with for many years; and Buck Owens’ red, white, and blue guitar. This week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll explore them as we cross the Red River and put our paddles into the waters from Bakersfield to Nashville.
Although Bob Wills is much more well-known as the western swing pioneer, I know more about his brother Johnnie Lee Wills from my Bullet 78rpm collection.
Johnnie Lee Wills played banjo with his brother as a member of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys starting in 1934, the year the band moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, broadcasting noon shows over the 50,000-watt KVOO radio station from Cain's Ballroom stage.
During their years in Tulsa (1934–43), the Texas Playboys continued to develop the swinging western jazz he pioneered in West Texas, adding drums and a brass and reeds horn section. On September 23, 1935, in Dallas, the Texas Playboys made their first recording together for the Vocalion label. They recorded eight titles, starting with Osage Stomp.
After his brother Bob moved to California in 1940, Johnnie Lee renamed the band Johnnie Lee Wills And His Boys.
In 1949, Johnnie and His Boys signed with Bullet records, the Nashville indie country label started in late 1945 by former Grand Ole Opry booking agent Jim Bulleit. After he couldn’t match the early success of his million record-selling Near You by Francis Craig, he sold out and the label focused on Hillbilly and R&B recordings. Incidentally, in 1949, Bullet released B.B. King’s first record, Miss Martha King.
Jonnie Lee Wills and his band recorded many fine songs with Bullet, but none more popular than Rag Mop:
Although it helped kick off “Rag Mop” fever, this western swing song is largely based upon the mid-1940s tune Get The Mop recorded by Henry “Red” Allen.
Red Allen, along with Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge, was one of the outstanding trumpet stylists of the 1930s.
He worked with King Oliver, Luis Russell, and Fletcher Henderson, where he developed a wonderful musical collaboration with Coleman Hawkins. Here is Red Allen’s Get The Mop, recorded for Victor in 1946. You can clearly hear the similarities:
We’ll learn more about Red Allen a little further down the river….
Incidentally, Luther J."Luke" Wills was the younger brother of Bob and Johnnie Wills and the seventh of the Wills’ family children. He made his debut with the Texas Playboys at Cain’s Ballroom in 1937. After WWII, Luke took over the Texas Playboys, but changed the name to Luke Wills’ Rhythm Busters. He recorded the jazz standard Four or Five Times, first made popular by Jimmie Noone and the Apex Club Orchestra and King Oliver and His Dixie Syncopaters in 1928.
Here’s a great photo of the Wills brothers in the early 1950s:
(l-r): Luke Wills, Johnnie Wills, Bob Wills, and Billy Jack Wills
Another Bullet recording artist who played with Bob Wills' Texas Playboys was Leon Payne.
Leon Payne grew up in Alba, Texas. He was blind in one eye at birth and lost sight of the other in a childhood accident. He began his singing and composing career at a radio station in Palestine, Texas.
In 1938 he joined Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys for a time and worked briefly with stepbrother Jack Rhodes before striking out on his own. He signed with Bullet in 1948 and was one of their best-selling artists.
Leon Payne is perhaps known most for Hank William’s versions of his songs, like his 1948 Lost Highway. William’s recorded Lost Highway for MGM records in 1949. I like Payne’s original version, with his banter during the song:
He opens the song with:
I'm a rolling stone, all alone and lost
For a life of sin, I have paid the cost
When I pass by, all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway
He must have had an affinity for “rolling stone”, as in 1948 he would pen another tune called just that, Rolling Stone:
Of course, all this business about Rolling Stones brought my mind back to Bob Wills and The Rolling Stones, who in Texas in 2005 played Waylon Jennings’ song Bob Wills Is Still The King:
I just love to hear Ron Woods on the pedal steel.
We’ll never know, but I like to think that Muddy Waters heard Leon Payne’s 1948 Bullet 78rpm Rolling Stone playing on the Jukeboxes in Chicago and incorporated it into his Chess release Rollin’ Stone, which he recorded in 1950:
After all, we do know that Hank Williams’ singing Payne’s Lost Highway gave Bob Dylan the title to his song Like a Rolling Stone and that Muddy Water’s song gave Rolling Stone magazine its name. So I’m going with that.
All this talk of Bullet records naturally brings us back to Sun Ra, who played piano on Wynonie (Mr. Blues) Harris’ 1946 Bullet recording session in Nashville. The session delivered two classic 78rpms both released in 1946: Dig this Boogie/Lightnin’ Struck the Poorhouse, and My Baby’s Barrel House/Drinkin’ By Myself.
This was Sun Ra’s first commercial recording, and Dig This Boogie was his first recorded piano solo:
When Sun Ra arrived in Chicago in 1945, he hooked up with Wynonie Harris, who was just leaving for Nashville. Soon after they got to there, they hit the Bullet studio to record these legendary sides.
Here’s one more for the road. The song that perhaps kick-started the whole Bakersfield Sound was Bud Hobb’s Louisiana Swing, recorded on the MGM label in 1954:
Interestingly, before the guitar solo, Hobbs shouts, “Aw, Buck Owens, let’s hear from ya.” Yes, that Buck Owens! Now, when I think of Buck Owens not only do I remember that old supervisor I worked with at Abbott, but I remember the killer red, white, and blue guitar Owens played the first time I watched Hee Haw on TV in the 1970s:
That is the same guitar played by Pat Smear and Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets during the 1993 Nirvana MTV Unplugged In New York concert. The guitar is a Buck Owens American manufactured by Harmony - essentially a dressed-up version of the small body H1203 Sovereign known as the Western Special.
Here’s Curt Kirkwood playing one on Lake Of Fire from the Nirvana unplugged concert:
Back to Freeman’s article, he wrote:
The Bakersfield sound is country at its most hardcore; it’s music for drinking, crying into your beer, and maybe getting into a fight, because you’ve got to be back behind the wheel of your truck the next morning. Its very un-slickness is its greatest virtue; it’s no surprise at all that when punk rockers get a little gray at the temples and start listening to country, their ears cock in the direction of Bakersfield, not Nashville.
I think that’s why my old supervisor liked those guys from Bakersfield and Tulsa. He was a big, tough hombre, an Army veteran, who always wore cowboy boots and a bolo tie with his suit. That’s why I liked him, and I’m grateful for what he taught me about country music and western swing. I look forward to seeing him again someday a little further down the road, so I can tell him where I’ve been and about my long road from Bakersfield to Nashville.
Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll backtrack and cover the Awesome Tapes in Africa waterfront and the cassette tape culture in general.
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Until then, keep on walking….