Lyric Theatre In Downtown Stuart

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. For 37 years, the biggest name in Texas Swing music has been Asleep at the Wheel. Fronted by the lanky, deep-voiced guitarist Ray Benson, the Wheel has kept this big-beat, cosmopolitan country music in the forefront. A stylized blend of Big Band, jazz and country, Texas Swing was the premiere dance music of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s on bandstands all across the South. “I always say to people, it’s like playing swing jazz music with a cowboy hat,” Benson says with a hearty laugh. “It’s taking swing music and blues played by a string band – there are horns, too, but it’s not Big Band. And lap steel, Hawaiian steel. And guitar. And fiddle.” Texan Bob Wills (1905-1975) is considered the founding father of this infectious musical hybrid (“cool, obscure American music,” as Benson calls it). A creatively jazz-inspired fiddler, Wills had fronted the Texas Playboys, the best of the best. As a high school student in West Virginia, Benson discovered Wills – who had long ceased making music – almost by accident. “I was into roots music – where did all this stuff that we’re doing come from?” Benson recalls. “I’d played in big bands, rock bands and square dance bands. I loved fiddle music. I loved Count Basie, Duke Ellington and rock ‘n’ roll. Plus I loved Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. “Then I came across this guy Bob Wills. As an instrumentalist guitar player, I loved soloing and improvisation. Bluegrass, blues, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll all had improvisation. So here was this music that combined all of those things – fiddle music, Basie, Ellington and Glenn Miller, and down-and-out blues like Bessie Smith and Tampa Red.” In the late ‘60s, Texas Swing had been all but forgotten, as string-soaked country/pop music ruled the airwaves, and the dancefloors. Benson and his buddies had their heads turned at a 1970 concert by the legendary Ernest Tubb and his band. “The Texas Troubadours would play jazz, swing and radio hits – in between Ernest’s sets of all his great songs,” Benson says. “So I went ‘Oh, you can do that!’ The Texas Troubadours were taking the Bob Wills approach, in a smaller band context, and doing it alongside this hillbilly singer. I saw that you could take a steel guitar, a fiddle, a guitar and do the same thing a trombone, a trumpet and a sax do.” It was one thing for the veterans in the Tubb band to play this way. For a bunch of kids, getting Wills into their bloodstreams meant learning the complex Western Swing arrangements from dusty old 78 records, rescued from junk stores and somebody’s grandma’s attic. “We tried to learn the Wills stuff from them, but the clarity was such that you couldn’t even hear what the bass was doing, et cetera …” says Benson. Enter country superstar Merle Haggard and his Wills tribute album, “The Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World,” on which he covered well over a dozen of Wills’ best-loved tunes. Several of the original Texas Playboys even played on the sessions. “When Haggard put that album out, using modern recording techniques, we could hear everything,” says Benson. “And so we took off really learning from that record. And George Strait told me the same thing – he was in the service somewhere, and he really wanted to be a country star. And that Haggard album really inspired him.” Two Asleep at the Wheel albums, “A Tribute to Bob Wills” and “Ride With Bob,” feature some of the finest vocalists in country and rock – from Haggard, Strait and Garth Brooks to Huey Lewis and Manhattan Transfer – taking the microphone on the great Texas Playboys tunes. Why has Asleep at the Wheel survived – and thrived – for so long? “Well, we’re the only ones doing it on a national scale,” Benson says, then adds: “Also, I think, because we’re pretty good at it. “It has a lot to do with the fact that we entertain while we’re doing it. Early on, one of these old guys came up and told me ‘You can’t educate from the bandstand. Just play to the audience.’ They always want to give you advice when you’re just starting out. “And my thing was, you can educate from the bandstand as long as you don’t make it like school.”