There Ain't No Thing, Like Western Swing

Bob Wills, Carl Jung, and Me

Photo by Jasper van der Meij on Unsplash

One of my earliest memories is walking through the desert outside Tuba City, AZ looking for aluminum cans to recycle. Dad is with me and we’re singing what is probably the first song I can remember learning: “Old Dan Tucker.” It’s an old American minstrel tune (old by American standards at any rate) and dates to 1843 — Texas was still an independent republic and the Mexican-American War was still three years away.

One of the many, many performers to cover “Old Dan Tucker” was Bob Wills. Wills was from Texas and was the frontman for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. He was dubbed the “King of Western Swing.”

Western swing is a genre that is, at its core, a type of jazz — complete with its working class roots, heavy use in the dancehall scene, and habit of improvisation. The only difference is that western swing is jazz played on traditional country instruments. It’s a little bit of a lot and it's twangy. A genre that is as much jazz, as it is blues, big band, polka, country, and even Mexican. Jean Boyd, a historian and musicologist, calls it the “Jazz of the Southwest.” At the end of the day it is a homegrown musical gumbo and a unique product of its origins in the American Southwest.

Ray Benson, the long-serving frontman of contemporary western swing band Asleep at the Wheel, said that “western swing would have just been a footnote in American music if it weren’t for Bob Wills, because Bob Wills was the Elvis Presley of his day.” It’s interesting Benson would make the comparison to Elvis, since both the “King of Western Swing” and the “King of Rock-and-Roll” were influenced by much of the same music; even if their sounds and ultimate fame were miles apart.

Bob Wills — the “King of Western Swing.”

The first time I’d ever heard about Bob Wills was while reading Ken Layne’s Desert Oracle in December 2023 (about four months after moving back to Arizona), and even then the name didn’t really stick around in the old brainpan. In fact, I probably forgot the name the same day. But from the mid-1930s to the early-1950s, Wills was unforgettable. He was on tour, on the radio, and in the movies. By 1945, shows by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys outdrew and outperformed acts like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. Wills was the real deal.

While re-reading Desert Oracle this week, I again finished his essay “The Murder King of Western Swing.” It’s an essay about western swing fiddler (and wife murderer) Spade Cooley, but the character that most caught my attention was the non-murdery Bob Wills. The connection between the two men is not just that they were breakout fiddlers of the western swing genre, but that they were both called the “King of Western Swing.” The difference was that Bob was given the name whereas Spade was a rex self-proclaimed.

I finished the essay on May 13, which meant nothing to me at the time. But, it’s funny how life works; how synchronicities appear and occur. “Synchronicities” are, in essence, meaningful coincidences between internal and external events. It was a term coined by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a man who had his own brief affair with the American Southwest and even traveled over the same ground Wills would a few years later. In a way, too, Jung fits into this larger narrative of synchronicities — and not entirely in ways I can fully explain, yet.

In January 1925, Jung took a Pullman out west, stopping in Arizona and New Mexico. Like any reasonable tourist, his first stop was the Grand Canyon. He and his pal Fowler McCormick — the son of the International Harvester Company chairman and grandson of John D. Rockefeller — then borrowed a Chevy and drove east towards New Mexico. The road they took was an unpaved, though driveable, Route 66. Part of it, interestingly enough, cuts through the bottom right corner of the Navajo Indian Reservation, of which my old home — and aluminum can hunting grounds —Tuba City is a part.

But when Jung took Route 66, it was a road that had not yet become iconic. Its paving, too, was two years away which meant that, in 1925, it was probably much like any wide, dirt road you could find down in Arizona today. That rustic quality gives Jung and Fowler’s trip a certain dusty, romantic halo that I approve of. As Fowler himself wrote: “Jung and I set off alone to take a journey in the land of the ‘endless horizon,’ that part of the Southwest lying between New Mexico and Eastern Texas.” While it is ironic that Jung went east to see more of the West, he was also heading in the direction of what would soon become the birthplace of western swing.

Photo by Arnaud STECKLE on Unsplash

Why May 13 matters in a personal and synchronistic sense — and this is part of what made me write this essay — is because it’s an important date within the Bob Wills lore. Wills died exactly fifty-years to the day (May 13, 1975) that I finished reading Ken Layne’s article. The kicker is that, until I looked Bob Wills up online, I had no idea that was even the case. Fifty years to the day.

I spent most of May 14 listening to the Bob Wills oeuvre on Spotify. There's something appropriate about driving to one's favorite burrito truck while listening to the upbeat steel guitar twang of western swing. I went through the entirety of The Essential Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys twice and The Essential Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys once. As you can tell by the ampersand, those are two separate albums.

One thing I like to do after making a discovery is to see what other people have to say about it. I usually frequent one of the too-many social medias and this time it was Twitter. After realizing a lot of people are still talking about him — there are even days and festivals in his honor — I found a tweet one user posted that read: “Starbucks shoulda used the Bob Wills version of Stay All Night Stay A Little Longer [sic].” That was the whole tweet — it was dated March 30, 2025.

Wait, Starbucks was using a Bob Wills song in a commercial?

So last night Jamie and I were watching baseball — as we often do on nights after work between April and October. It was probably around the middle of the 8th inning when, lo and behold, a Starbucks commercial came on. It was the Willie Nelson version of the Bob Wills tune “Stay All Night, Stay A Little Longer.”

Suddenly, it felt like I was seeing Bob Wills everywhere. Was this a true synchronicity? Did reading an essay about him on the day he died (which I didn’t know at the time), then hearing about his song being used in a Starbucks commercial and then hearing that exact same commercial less than an hour later…mean something?

I guess it depends on your perspective and how you see life. Sure, this could all just be coincidence. But maybe it isn’t. Now, is Bob Wills trying to reach out to me from beyond the grave? Unlikely. But sometimes messages can come from the strangest and most unforeseen places, and at the most unlikely of times. Just as Saul of Tarsus.

But the real kicker is something I found out while writing this essay. That song “Old Dan Tucker” I mentioned at the beginning — the one I sang with my dad while hunting up aluminum cans — is the exact same melody Bob Wills used in “Stay All Night, Stay A Little Longer.”

Now that is weird.