Bob Wills was a major force in American music. With his band, the Texas Playboys, he was a leading exponent of western swing, the boundary crossing music that mixed country with big band jazz. A long forgotten 1938 biography, written as his star was rising, has been reissued in paperback. The author, an Oklahoma journalist, dwells on his workingclass origins, “a cotton picker from Texas whose grammar was learned in the fields” and “plays for the great mass of farmers and hard laboring men and women from whose ranks he came.” The prose is like a WPA mural of blue-collar fortitude. Hubbin’ It is an interesting document showing how a musician of obscure origins such as Wills used the nascent medium of radio in live studio performances to reach an audience.
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