Description

“Play It Lazy”

The Bob Wills Fiddle Legacy

By Lanny Fiel and Frankie McWhorter

Book and Cassette
Rare Collector’s Item

What makes Texas Fiddle different from all the other styles? It’s all in how you draw the bow and how life was lived on the Texas Plains.

I heard about Frankie McWhorter in 1991. Joe Carr and Alan Munde of South Plains College in Levelland, Texas, introduced me to a recording they made with Frankie playing fiddle tunes he had learned from Bob Wills. And that’s all it took. I listened over and over again; wrote ’em down . . . transcribed every note; then traveled to the Gray Ranch in the Panhandle of Texas to meet the man himself.[expand title=”(Read more)”]

When I got there in the afternoon Frankie started to fiddle and played through the night. One tune right after the other, “Liberty,” “Arkansas Traveler,” “Sally Gooden” all of the old standards he knew and played them different every time*. That’s the tradition you know. But when it came to the tunes Frankie learned directly from Bob Wills he played them the same way every time.

How do I know? Well, Frankie told me whenever he toured with Bob he would pull his mentor aside and bug him. He wanted to learn the old tunes and the old way of doing things. Bob Wills (1905 – 1975) learned from his father “Uncle John” Wills (1880 – 1952) and he played tunes you didn’t hear much. “Harry of the West,” “Loula,” or “Hunky-Dory,”they weren’t featured onstage . . . not like “San Antonio Rose.”

Frankie had a great deal of respect and admiration for Bob. All of the Texas Playboys agreed Frankie sounded more like Bob Wills than Bob Wills.

And that’s it. Like I said, I arrived at Gray Ranch with a notebook full of transcriptions.  And as Frankie played I heard him match what I had written note for note even when it came to odd meter . . . like an extra beat in a bar of four.

You may have heard some folks say Bob Wills broke meter that way. But that’s not true. The old time fiddlers often threw in an extra beat here and there. It’s another part of the tradition . . . the old way of doing things rooted in country life. (It’s just that those extra beats make it tough when it comes to holding a modern large band together.)

That said I could not count the number of times I visited Frankie McWhorter the Cowboy Fiddler and Ranch Foreman. We would fiddle or ride around in his truck checking on the cows. All the while drifting over what seemed like nothing but flat land with no end. But that too, is not the case.

While Frankie drove I began to notice a crevice or small dry wash in those rolling hills. And it looked like the way Frankie would scoop a long note with his bow. That’s exactly how he played . . . just like Bob Wills and just like the rolling Panhandle Plains.

Lanny Fiel