Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys brought Western Swing to the fore in the 1940s and helped define the ‘other’ half of Country & Western music.

There’s a joke in the film The Blues Brothers where Elwood asks the barmaid of a redneck cowboy bar that’s booked them what kind of music she usually puts on there.

“We got both kinds,” she says. “Country *and* Western.”

Back in the 1920s, before they merged, they really were two separate musical genres. Country was came from rural regions in the East and was derived from folk, usually using small groups playing guitar, fiddle and banjo. Or as Harlan Howard put it: “Three chords and the truth.”

Western music was was based around swinging rhythms and jazz chord progressions and played usually by big bands, often featuring steel guitar and hot solo spots.

The most famous exponents were fiddler Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, a dance band with a country string section that played pop songs as if they were jazz numbers. This is their signature tune, San Antonio Rose.

Bob’s not the lead singer – that’s the chubby chap, Tommy Duncan, who was nicknamed The Human Jukebox for his ability to memorise more than 3,000 songs and sing them as if he wrote them, as well as playing piano, guitar and bass. Wills is the one who joins him at the microphone, making those funny whooping and sighing sounds with his fiddle in his hand.

The other star of the show is Leon McAuliffe, a teenage prodigy on the pedal steel guitar, who joined the group – originally called The Light Crust Doughboys – and was the first man to play amplified guitar on a country record.

He was the hero of my great friend Steve England, one of the original punks of 1977 (he grew up with Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten), who became arguably the only Cockney pedal steel player in Texas. After moving to Austin, Steve took up the instrument himself and it was one of his proudest achievements to have played onstage with some of the surviving members of the Texas Playboys.

Bob Wills was a sharecropper from the age of 13, and the son of a champion fiddler. He grew up on a cotton farm among poor black families in Texas. Wills became a hobo at the age of 16, riding the railroads before becoming a barber and taking his first forays into music in minstrel and medicine shows, where he also performed as a blackface comedian (like Jimmie Rodgers before him).

San Antonio Rose was recorded in Dallas in 1938 and came about by accident, as so many great songs did, when the producer asked for another song that sounded like one called Spanish Two-Step. Someone in the Band said “We haven’t got one,” Bob replied “We’ll just play “Spanish Two-Step” backwards. So they did (sort of), playing it in different keys, only adding the words two years later and retitling the song New San Antonio Rose.

Over a 40-year career Wills brought the music of the Southwest to the rest of America, blending waltz, jug band, blues, jigs, boogie-woogie and Mexican music and popularising drums and dual guitars.

So here they are, all ten of ’em, playing their most famous song: Eldon Shamblin [guitar], Herman Arnspiger [guitar], Johnnie Lee Wills [banjo], Leon McAuliffe [steel guitar/chimes], Son Lansford [bass], Bob Wills [fiddle], Jesse Ashlock [fiddle], Smokey Dacus [drums], Al Stricklin [piano], Sleepy Johnson [fiddle].