Out From Behind the Curtain: Bob Wills, Monte Mountjoy, and the night Western swing brought its rhythm to the Grand Ole Opry

Smokey Dacus had a reasonable question when Bob Wills asked him to join the Texas Playboys in 1935.

“What in the hell do you want with a drummer in a fiddle band?”

Wills wanted the music to swing. Dacus joined the band, and the drum kit became part of a sound that was already stretching well beyond the old string-band lineup. Wills added horns, amplified instruments, piano, steel guitar, and a rhythm section as the Texas Playboys grew through the 1930s. Fiddle tunes shared the floor with jazz, blues, pop songs, Mexican music, and big-band arrangements. Oxford American

The combination worked in the dance halls.

Nashville had its own ideas.

The Grand Ole Opry had grown from the WSM Barn Dance into the most influential country music radio program in the country. Its musical identity remained closely tied to fiddles, banjos, guitars, and string bands. Drums carried associations with jazz and popular dance orchestras. The Country Music Hall of Fame notes that early country musicians often regarded them as too loud and out of keeping with the music. Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

Bob Wills had been building his music around rhythm for years.

On December 30, 1944, he brought the Texas Playboys to Nashville.

Saturday Night at the Ryman

Wills arrived at the Grand Ole Opry as a national star. “New San Antonio Rose” had carried the Texas Playboys far beyond their Southwestern audience, and the band had spent much of 1944 touring nationally. Their lineup included fiddles, electric guitars, steel guitar, basses, trumpet, and drummer Monte Mountjoy. Google Books

The drums became an issue as soon as the band prepared to perform.

Opry management told Wills that drums were prohibited. The Opry’s own history records that he refused to leave them out and performed with Mountjoy anyway. Opry

Then comes the curtain.

One version has Mountjoy setting up backstage, hidden from the audience. Just before airtime, Wills orders the drum kit moved into view. The story has appeared in Opry histories, country music books, and accounts of the performance for decades. The Country Music Hall of Fame describes it cautiously as one of the stories surrounding the Opry’s resistance to drums. World Radio History

Charles Townsend challenged that account.

For San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills, Townsend interviewed Wills, his wife Betty, and musicians who had been at the Ryman that night. He wrote that the people he interviewed denied the curtain story and remembered the drums and horns in full view. Google Books

Two facts hold across the accounts. The Opry objected to the drums. Monte Mountjoy played.

The Texas Playboys performed “New San Antonio Rose,” bringing the sound that had made them famous into a room identified with another branch of country music. Contemporary and later Opry histories remember the appearance as a collision between Wills’s large Western swing orchestra and Nashville’s rules about instrumentation. World Radio History

A Different Country Sound

Western swing had already answered the question Nashville was still debating.

A country band could have a drummer.

It could have trumpets and saxophones. It could use electric instruments. It could borrow from jazz orchestration and still play fiddle tunes. It could fill a dance floor with a beat carried by a rhythm section.

Wills had spent the previous decade proving it across Texas, Oklahoma, and the West. The Texas State Historical Association describes the Playboys’ Tulsa years as the period when the band developed its “swinging western jazz,” adding drums along with brass and reed instruments. Texas State Historical Association

The Opry changed more slowly.

Drums remained controversial in Nashville well into the following years. The instrument spread steadily through country recording sessions and touring bands, particularly as honky-tonk, the Nashville Sound, and rock and roll changed the rhythmic language of commercial country music. By the early 1960s, the Country Music Hall of Fame notes, a country band without a drummer had become unusual. Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

Monte Mountjoy had played at the Ryman almost twenty years earlier.

Bob Wills brought the band he had built.

Mountjoy sat at the drums.

The Texas Playboys played.

References

• Boyd, Jean A. The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing. University of Texas Press, 1998.

• Townsend, Charles R. San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills. University of Illinois Press, 1976. Townsend interviewed Wills and many of the Texas Playboys and specifically disputed the familiar curtain account. Google Books

• Texas State Historical Association. “Wills, James Robert.” Handbook of Texas. Texas State Historical Association

• Texas State Historical Association. “Country Music.” Handbook of Texas. Texas State Historical Association

• Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “History of Country Music Instruments.” Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

• Grand Ole Opry. “Our Favorite Opry at the Ryman Moments Over the Years.”