AMARILLO, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) – From spoons to fiddles, field songs to swing halls, it’s not uncommon to find entire eras of the High Plains memorialized through music, with epitaphs of tablature sometimes easier to find than other historical documentation.
Music has always been a way not only for humans to connect with their own homes and histories, but to share them with others and collaborate to spread new sounds across the world. This is vibrantly illustrated in the stories of several regional icons for the Texas Panhandle and High Plains, with one of the most beloved being James Robert “Bob” Wills – the “King of Western Swing.”
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Wills was born in Kosse, Texas in March 1905, as the first of 10 children. As noted by the Texas State Historical Association and The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, the family moved to Hall County in 1913 and settled on a ranch between Memphis and Estelline; in the early 1920s, they would relocate again to a farm and ranch between the Little Red River and the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. (In essence: the Wills were known in the area for a little yellow house between the rivers near Turkey.)
The family was recorded to be as full of people as fiddle players, introducing Wills to frontier fiddle music at an early age (the Country Music Hall of Fame notes Wills’ father had beaten fiddlers such as Eck Robertson in contests “on more than one occasion”). Between his family and living in a region famous for Black musicians like Scott Joplin, Victoria Spivey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, as well as through connections to Black neighbors and migrant workers in his communities, Wills grew to have a deep love of fiddling, blues, ragtime, and jazz. He took to the stage and started playing for local dances by around age 10, gaining some notoriety for a “long bow” technique differentiating him from other fiddlers…