Oklahoma guitar player Eldon Shamblin joined the band in 1937 bringing jazzy influence and arrangements.

Wills favored jazz-like arrangements and the band found national popularity into the 1940s with such hits as "Steel Guitar Rag", "San Antonio Rose", "Smoke on the Water", "Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima", and "New Spanish Two Step".

Wills and the Texas Playboys recorded with several publishers and companies, including Vocalion, Okeh, Columbia, and MGM.

There, he played in minstrel and medicine shows, and, as with other Texas musicians such as Ocie Stockard, continued to earn money as a barber.

[20] Wills quickly became known for being talkative on the bandstand, a tendency he picked up from family, local cowboys, and the style of Black musicians he had heard growing up.

Brown added twin fiddles, tenor banjo, and slap bass, pointing the music in the direction of swing, which they played on local radio and at dancehalls.

[26] After forming a new band, The Playboys, and relocating to Waco, Texas, Wills found enough popularity there to decide on a bigger market.

Wills soon settled the renamed Texas Playboys in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began broadcasting noon shows over the 50,000-watt KVOO radio station, from the stage of Cain's Ballroom.

The addition of steel guitar whiz Leon McAuliffe in March 1935 added not only a formidable instrumentalist, but also a second engaging vocalist.

[31] Altogether, Wills appeared in 19 films, including The Lone Prairie (1942), Riders of the Northwest Mounted (1943), Saddles and Sagebrush (1943), The Vigilantes Ride (1943), The Last Horseman (1944), Rhythm Round-Up (1945), Blazing the Western Trail (1945), and Lawless Empire (1945).

[26] In December 1942, after several band members had left the group, and as World War II raged, Wills joined the Army at the age of 37,[32][33] but received a medical discharge in 1943.

[36] He became an enormous draw in Los Angeles, where many of his fans had relocated during the Great Depression and World War II in search of jobs.

[37] He commanded enormous fees playing dances there, and began to make more creative use of electric guitars to replace the big horn sections the Tulsa band had boasted.

For a very brief period in 1944, the Wills band included 23 members,[34] and around mid-year, he toured Northern California and the Pacific Northwest with 21 pieces in the orchestra.

[38] Billboard reported that Wills out-grossed Harry James, Benny Goodman, "both Dorsey brothers bands, et al." at Civic Auditorium in Oakland, California, in January 1944.

[39] Wills and His Texas Playboys began their first cross-country tour in November 1944, and appeared at the Grand Ole Opry on December 30, 1944.

An attempt to compromise by keeping Mountjoy behind a curtain collapsed when Wills had his drums placed front and center onstage at the last minute.

[34] In 1947, he opened the Wills Point nightclub in Sacramento, California, and continued touring the Southwest and Pacific Northwest from Texas to Washington.

[37] During the postwar period, KGO radio in San Francisco syndicated a Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys show recorded at the Fairmont Hotel.

[1] They show off the band's strengths significantly, in part because the group was not confined to the three-minute limits of 78 RPM discs.

Turning the club over to managers, later revealed to be dishonest, left Wills in desperate financial straits with heavy debts to the IRS for back taxes.

[46] He continued to tour and record through the 1950s into the early 1960s despite the fact that Western swing's popularity, even in the Southwest, had greatly diminished.

[49] Even a 1958 return to KVOO, where his younger brother Johnnie Lee Wills had maintained the family's presence, did not produce the success he hoped.

After two heart attacks, in 1965, he dissolved the Texas Playboys (who briefly continued as an independent unit) to perform solo with house bands.

Wills, speaking or attempting to holler, appeared on a couple tracks from the first day's session but suffered a stroke overnight.

But though earlier recordings of most of these classic tunes are at least marginally sharper, it certainly captures the relaxed, playful, eclectic Western swing groove that Wills invited in the '30s.

In addition, The Rolling Stones performed this song live in Austin, Texas, at Zilker Park on their A Bigger Bang Tour, a shout-out to Wills.

Wills' upbeat 1938 song "Ida Red" was Chuck Berry's primary inspiration for creating his first rock-and-roll hit "Maybellene".

The Bob Wills Birthday Celebration is held every year in March at the Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a Western swing concert and dance.

[63][64] Bob Wills was honored in episode two of Ken Burns' 2019 series on PBS called Country Music.