JACKSON HOLE, WYO – Asleep at the Wheel once played six nights a week for two weeks straight at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar on Jackson’s Town Square. It was 1972—long before nine Grammy Awards amidst thirteen more nominations—and the band had just finished recording their first album, Comin’ Right at Ya. The legendary Western & Texas swing ensemble will return to the bar’s remodeled stage this Sunday for St. Patrick’s Day.
“It was winter and the crowd was out-of-work cowboys and guides,” remembered frontman and founder of the band, Ray Benson, in a 2009 interview. “There was little tourism in the winter at that time. People were receptive of our sound.”
The Wheel moved from Oakland, California to their current Austin, Texas home in 1972, and the next visit to town landed them a show at Snow King Resort. Thirty-six years later, the seven-piece ensemble is still rooted in their original focus—to play American roots music.
“Modern country music had taken over and we were the only band playing Western swing,” said Benson, who had passed through Jackson as a kid in 1958.
Though Benson never got to see him perform live, Western swing pioneer Bob Wills would become the band’s biggest influence. Wills passed in 1975, and Benson collected 78s of the Texas native. Wills had learned traditional music from his family and had picked up Negro songs while working directly next to black co-workers in the cotton fields. By the late 1940s, Western swing had been coined and Wills’ Texas Playboys grew to include twenty-three members at one point. When the 100th anniversary of Wills’ birth approached in 2005, Benson teamed up with scriptwriter Anne Rapp to create the musical A Ride with Bob.
Get ready for swingin’ Texas fiddle, lap steel and honkytonkin’ piano—a relic of the good ole days of the Million Dollar Cowboy.
Asleep at the Wheel, 8 p.m. Sunday at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. Texas swing. $28, or $78/VIP. MillionDollarCowboyBar.com.
