Billy Jack Wills Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD)

(4)

Preview: Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD)

Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD)

Listen to sample now:

0:00

$18.66 * $21.00 * (11.14% Saved)

* incl. VAT / plus shipping costsDepending on the country of delivery, the VAT at checkout may vary.

Ready to ship today,
delivery time** appr. 1-3 workdays

catalog number: BCD17644
weight in Kg 0.2
PDF (deutsch) Download
PDF (english) Download

P Secure bonuspoints now

1-CD Digipak, 36-page booklet, 31 tracks, total playing time approx. 75 min. Another... more

Close menu

Billy Jack Wills: Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD)

1-CD Digipak, 36-page booklet, 31 tracks, total playing time approx. 75 min.

Another exciting title in Bear Family Records®' popular 'Gonna Shake This Shack' series.
Billy Jack Wills was the youngest brother in the Texas Wills Western Swing dynasty.
He wrote the lyrics to Faded Love, the huge 1950 hit for his big brother Bob!
At the time, Billy Jack was running the Wills Point club in Sacramento for his brother Bob and formed a house band - one of the hippest Western swing bands of the 1940s and early '50s - that accompanied him on these recordings.
Trademark: the hardest backbeat in country music at the time.
Jazzy rockin' versions of Good Rockin' Tonight, Crazy Man Crazy, All She Wants to Do Is Rock alongside (Western) Swing classics like Air Mail Special, C-Jam Blues and Cadillac in Model' A' - great Rhythm & Western in its purest form!
31 songs, described in detail in the extensive illustrated booklet with liner notes by Roland Heinrich Rumtreiber.

Here is yet another exciting title in Bear Family Records®' popular series 'Gonna Shake This Shack'.

Billy Jack Wills was the youngest brother of the Wills western swing dynasty. Born February 26, 1926, in Memphis, Hall County, TX, Billy Jack joined the family business as Johnnie Lee Wills' bass player in his late teens. However, mighty Bob Wills ordered him to California to join the Texas Playboys as bass player and drummer. He was also occasionally featured as a vocalist, and he proved his worth by writing the lyrics to Faded Love, Will's massive hit of 1950.

In the late 1940s, Billy Jack Wills took over management of Wills Point, Bob's club in Sacramento. While Bob and the Texas Playboys went on tour again, Billy Jack formed the house band that accompanied him on these recordings. Legendary Playboy Tiny Moore did not want to get back on the road with Bob and became the featured star and co-vocalist in Billy Jack's Western Swing Band.

The band also included trumpeter and bassist Dick McComb, fiddler and bassist Cotton Roberts, rhythm guitarist Kenny Lowery, and later local teen steel guitarist, Vance Terry. Vance idolized the jazzy Hawaiian style of Noel Boggs.

Since Billy Jack was twenty years younger than Bob, his musical influences were more up-to-date. Billy and Tiny had the most progressive band in the early and mid-1950s. Billy Jack also encouraged his members to improvise. Despite the jazzy solos of Terry and McComb, Billy Jack's Western Swing Band had the hardest backbeat in country music. Billy Jack indeed was on the verge of rocking & rolling. The band had a strong following in the Pacific Northwest, and their covers of r & b hits of the day were dance floor magnets.

Bear Family Records® presents Billy Jack Will's Western Swing band at their jazzy rockinest: The CD presents their splendid versions of Good Rockin' Tonight, Crazy Man Crazy, All She Wants to Do Is Rock, alongside (western) swing classics such as Air Mail Special, C-Jam Blues, and the song Wills is genuinely famous for Cadillac in Model' A'. Bear Family Records® presents the MGM version AND the rockin' radio transcript recorded at KFBK Studios, Sacramento, CA. Most of the other songs also stem from the 1952-54 Sacramento sessions held at KFBK. Most western swing bands excelled during radio sessions - the informality brought out the best in the high-class improvisers of that genre. Thus, the tracks surpass any commercial studio recording of the time. Here are 31 selections of Billy Jack Wills and his Western Swing Band – at their swinging finest!

Video von Billy Jack Wills - Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD)

Article properties: Billy Jack Wills: Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD)

Interpret: Billy Jack Wills
Album titlle: Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD)
Genre Country
Label Bear Family Records
Preiscode AH
Artikelart CD
EAN: 4000127176448
weight in Kg 0.2

Wills, Billy Jack - Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD) CD 1
01	Kentucky Means Paradise	Billy Jack Wills
02	There's Good Rockin' Tonight	Billy Jack Wills
03	Crazy Man Crazy	Billy Jack Wills
04	Cadillac In Model 'A'	Billy Jack Wills
05	Out Of Gas	Billy Jack Wills
06	Hey Lula (Hey Lu-La)	Billy Jack Wills
07	Air Mail Special	Billy Jack Wills
08	For You My Love	Billy Jack Wills
09	All She Wants To Do Is Rock	Billy Jack Wills
10	Kissin' Bug Boogie	Billy Jack Wills
11	Roped And Tied	Billy Jack Wills
12	C-Jam Blues	Billy Jack Wills
13	Sweet Georgia Brown	Billy Jack Wills
14	Water Baby Boogie	Billy Jack Wills
15	I Don't Know	Billy Jack Wills
16	Sugar Blues	Billy Jack Wills
17	Bottle Baby Boogie	Billy Jack Wills
18	Milk Cow Blues	Billy Jack Wills
19	Jelly Roll Blues	Billy Jack Wills
20	Troubles (That Lonesome Kind)	Billy Jack Wills
21	Woodchopper's Ball	Billy Jack Wills
22	Rock-A-Bye Baby Blues	Billy Jack Wills
23	She's A Quarter Horse Type (Of A Gal)	Billy Jack Wills
24	Lonesome Hearted Blues	Billy Jack Wills
25	Dipsy Doodle	Billy Jack Wills
26	Tobacco Chewing Boogie	Billy Jack Wills
27	Mr. Cotton Picker	Billy Jack Wills
28	Hey Mr. Mailman	Billy Jack Wills
29	Teardrops From My Eyes	Billy Jack Wills
30	Cadillac In Model 'A' (MGM)	Billy Jack Wills
31	My Shoes Keep Walkin' Back To You	Billy Jack Wills

Billy Jack Wills Bob Wills's youngest brother, BILLY JACK, led what was probably northern... more

Close menu

"Billy Jack Wills"

Billy Jack Wills

Bob Wills's youngest brother, BILLY JACK, led what was probably northern California's most popular western swing band during the early '50s.

Born in Memphis, Hall Co., Texas in 1926, he learned to play guitar, bass and drums. He played with Johnnie Lee Wills in the early '40s and at various times with brother Bob, most notably during the five-year period after World War II. Billy Jack's greatest fame may well reside in the fact that he wrote the lyrics to Faded Love, and guested as vocalist on a number of Bob's MGM discs including Rock-A-Bye Baby Blues and Bottle Baby Boogie, from which Charlie Feathers may have got the inspiration for Bottle To The Baby. Billy Jack also wrote the rocking Cadillac In Model A.

By 1950, Billy Jack and Texas Playboy Tiny Moore had organised their own band to play at Wills Point Ballroom near Sacramento. Bob Wills owned it but, having moved to Oklahoma City, he left the management of the leisure centre to Moore, who had tired of cross-country touring. The two men recruited Kenny Lowery (rhythm guitar), Tommy Varner (steel), Dick McComb (trumpet) and Cotton Roberts (bass). Moore sang and played mandolin and fiddle; Billy Jack also sang and played drums. Vance Terry, a teenager from Sacramento, replaced Varner in 1951.

Inevitably, Billy Jack never escaped the shadow of his more famous brother, and his small group was relegated to the second division in which, despite their be-bop orientation, one western swing band sounded very much like another. Nevertheless, the aforementioned line-up appeared daily over the 50,000 watt KFBK, stomped the stage at Wills Point on Saturday nights and toured the west. According to Rich Kienzle, the band's boogie and blues songs garnered most attention and, unlike other western swing ensembles, Billy Jack was heavily influenced by R&B, citing B.B. King as one of his favourite artists.

The group's recordings for 4-STAR (1951-2) and then MGM didn't always reflect that bias, but we've located Billy Jack's mould-breaking revival of Good Rockin' Tonight, and one of the follow-ups, All She Wants To Do Is Rock. This also swings along nicely in a relaxed, old-bufferish kind of way. Wynonie Harris captured more of the song's true intent in his chart-topping version in 1949.

"I thought our band was a lot like Bill Haley and the Comets," Moore told Kienzle. "He just had better exposure. They called him rock 'n' roll... we weren't consciously going that way but we sounded a lot like his band." Haley's Crazy Man Crazy, Willie Mabon's I Don't Know and Ruth Brown's Teardrops From My Eyes were among the transcriptions which Billy Jack laid down at KFBK in the early '50s.

The group broke up in 1954. Most of the members went to work for brother Bob's Texas Playboys, appearing on the first DECCA session in 1955. Billy Jack retired in 1960 and died on March 2, 1991.

Read, write and discuss reviews... more

Close menu

Customer evaluation for "Cadillac In Model 'A' - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight (CD)"

From: Mike Greenblatt On: 4 Nov 2022

That is why we love Bear Family Records!

So this cat Billy Jack Wills was apparently one big-time bad-ass in his day and this is why we love Bear Family Records, the German label who takes so many forgotten American pioneers, resurrects them from underneath the dustbin of history, and returns them to their former glory. Dwight Yoakam and Marty Stuart taught us that true unvarnished hillbilly music is actually cool, not a degrading epithet to be called such, more like a badge of honor. White Soul! (Let us not forget that when Elvis was changing the world, he called himself “The Hillbilly Cat.”)
Cadillac In Model “A”: Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight by Memphis native Billy Jack Wills is a stone keeper. Billy Jack was 20 years younger than his legendary brother Bob "The King Of Western Swing" Wills who installed him as part-time bassist and drummer for his Texas Playboys before sending him out west to California to run The Wills Point Club in Sacramento. So Billy Jack goes and forms a house band so hard-charging and in-your face, it becomes one of the hippest bands of the 1940s and early ‘50s. They had the wildest backbeat in all of country music. They could swing mightily. They could do the bop, do the stroll, they improvised jam-band style, they even took some cues from Hawaiian music. They stopped just short of rockin’ and rollin’ since there was no such thing at the time…but you’d be hard-pressed to believe that by listening to these 31 tracks, especially “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Crazy Man Crazy,” “All She Wants To Do Is Rock” and “C-Jam Blues.”

From: Simon Nott On: 2 Nov 2022

The HARDEST BACKBEAT in Country Music!

Billy Jack and the boys merge, western swing, jazz and the emerging rock 'n' roll genre cover tracks like 'Crazy Man Crazy' and 'Good Rockin' Tonight' in their own style.

From: Bo On: 1 Aug 2022

Billy Jack's Western Swing Band had the heaviest backbeat in country music

Billy Jack Wills, the youngest brother of western swing legend Bob Wills, gets a nice release in the "Gonna Shake This Chess Tonight" series, which includes releases from 1951-56 for the 4-Star and MGM labels and 18 recordings from radio transcriptions from 1952-54.Billy was born on February 26, 1926 in Memphis, Hall County, Texas and began as Johnnie Lee Will's bass player in his teens. But Bob Wills wanted him to come to California and join the Texas Playboys as bassist and drummer. He also turned out to be a good singer, and he proved his creativity by writing the lyrics to "Faded Love," Wills' huge hit in 1950. In the late 1940s, Billy Jack Wills took over the management of Wills Point, Bob's club in Sacramento. While Bob and the Texas Playboys went on tour again, Billy Jack formed his own band to perform at the club. Tiny Moore, from Will's band, was tired of touring and became the star of the club and also the vocalist with Billy in his band, Billy Jack's Wes- tern Swing Band. The band also included Dick McComb (trumpet/bass), Cotton Roberts (fiddle/bass), Kenny Lowery (acoustic guitar) and Vance Terry (steel guitar). Being twenty years younger than Bob, Billy Jack's musical influences were not the same as Bob's. Billy and Tiny had the most progressive band in the early and mid-1950s. Billy Jack also encouraged his members to improvise. Despite Terry and McComb's jazzy solos, Billy Jack's Western Swing Band had the heaviest backbeat in country music. Billy Jack presents his versions of "Good Rockin' Tonight", "Crazy Man Crazy", "All She Wants To Do Is Rock" and not to forget "Air Mail Special", "C-Jam Blues" and "Cadillac in Model 'A'". Informative text in the booklet by Roland Heinrich and a detailed discography.