On September 27, 1974, Waylon Jennings stood on the stage of the Texas Opry House in Austin — a club owned by Willie Nelson, in the city Willie was rapidly turning into the capital of progressive country — and introduced a brand-new song to a crowd packed shoulder to shoulder. “This is a song I wrote on a plane between Dallas and Austin,” he told them, “about a man that has as much to do with why we’re down here as anybody.” Then he sang Bob Wills Is Still the King, a rolling salute to the founding father of Western swing that also happened to be a loving, pointed joke at the expense of the man who owned the building. It became the closing track of Dreaming My Dreams, shared a No. 1 single with Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way, and turned into one of the most argued-over three minutes in country music history.
The King
Bob Wills was, by any honest accounting, one of the founders of country music as a popular form. With his Texas Playboys, Wills had fused fiddle breakdowns, jazz horns, blues, and pop crooning into Western swing, filled dance halls across Texas and Oklahoma through the 1930s and 1940s, and given the music standards like San Antonio Rose and Faded Love, sung in their classic versions by Tommy Duncan. Every Texas musician of Jennings’s generation had grown up in Wills’s shadow — literally, in Jennings’s case. As he later explained, the Texas clubs he played as a young man “had those big Bob Wills dance floors… I’d get up on the long bandstand, built for a twelve-piece cowboy orchestra, and I’d be telling my four guys to start spreading out.”
By 1974 the king was fallen. Wills had suffered a series of strokes; during sessions for a final album with his old band in 1973 he had been stricken again, and he would never perform publicly again. He was still alive when Jennings wrote the song — he died on May 13, 1975 — which gives the tribute its peculiar tense: not a eulogy but a coronation reaffirmed, a king declared still reigning while he lay incapacitated. When Wills did die, United Press International’s obituary reached for Jennings’s lyric to sum up what Texas thought of him, quoting the verse about crossing the Red River. The song had already become the official sentiment.
The Letter to Willie
Here is the part Jennings admitted himself: the tribute began as an argument. He and Nelson were sharing a manager, the formidable Neil Reshen, and had fallen into one of their periodic feuds — this one over a booking disagreement. “I really wrote that song ‘cuz I was mad at Willie,” Jennings said, “and it was a letter. I thought I’d write him a letter in rhyme. And the more I got along with it I go, ‘Hmm, this ain’t bad. Willie gon’ really like this. He gonna wish he had one like that.'” Nelson’s picnics and his Austin stronghold were drawing national attention, and people had begun calling him the king of the scene. The song is Jennings’s reply: a reminder, addressed to his best friend in front of his best friend’s own crowd, that neither of them was the king of Texas music — because the throne was already occupied, permanently.
Nelson, to his credit, refused to be wounded. In his 2015 memoir It’s a Long Story, he recalled watching Jennings spring the song on the Texas Opry House crowd, seeing the “devilish look in his eye,” and being approached afterward by a Jennings clearly hoping for a fight. He asked Nelson what he thought of the song. “A hit,” Willie said, “one of your best.” What about the lyrics? “Right on the money.” Nelson wrote: “Waylon looked a little disappointed. He was gearing up for an argument, and I wouldn’t give him one. Truth be told, I really did like the song. And besides, he’d sung the gospel truth; as far as I was concerned, Bob Wills was still the king.”
The scholars got hold of it almost immediately. Folklorist Nicholas Spitzer published an exegesis of the song in 1975, the year it was released. Michael Striessguth read it as Waylon poking fun at “Willie Nelson and the redneck rock thing down in Texas.” Lecturer Trent Hill later called it possibly “a complicated joke,” with the targets deliberately unclear. And then there is Jennings’s own late-life complication of everything: asked about Wills in later years, he cheerfully confessed, “I never was a big Bob Wills fan… I liked two of his songs. I really did. That was a misconception.” The song, he insisted, was as much about those oversized dance-hall stages — and about the small bands dwarfed by them — as about the man himself. A tribute by a non-fan, aimed at a friend, that fooled a generation into hearing pure devotion: only Waylon Jennings could have pulled that off, and he did it live, in one take, in Willie’s house.
Part of the song’s richness is how much Texas history is smuggled into its three minutes. It name-checks San Antonio Rose, Wills’s signature tune; it nods to Tommy Duncan, the voice of the Texas Playboys; it sets the Grand Ole Opry and Nashville on the far side of the Red River and finds them wanting; and its most quoted sentiment — that you just can’t live in Texas unless you’ve got a lot of soul — is itself borrowed, quoted from At the Crossroads, a 1969 record by the Sir Douglas Quintet, Doug Sahm’s great Texas band. The music refuses to settle into pastiche, too: it is not really Western swing and not straight country, but a slow mixture of country, country rock, and rockabilly, with Mooney’s steel and Crabtree’s harmonica testifying to its Western origins. Jennings even took the song to one of Willie’s early Fourth of July Picnics and performed it there — and by his own cheerful account in his autobiography, the performance grew so wild that women in the audience began taking their clothes off. The letter had become a folk ritual.
The Record
The live recording — Jennings and Ray Pennington producing, Ralph Mooney on steel, Richie Albright on drums, Roger Crabtree on harmonica — closed Dreaming My Dreams in June 1975, the album that became Jennings’s first No. 1 country album. Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that the album is bookended by the two songs: it opens with Hank Williams’s legacy and closes with Wills’s, making Jennings “an heir apparent to [the] legacies” of both. The same Austin performances also yielded most of Waylon Live, released in 1976.
In August 1975, RCA issued the live track on a single together with Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way. The pairing was a phenomenon. Billboard treated it as a two-sided hit, and by early November 1975 the record stood at No. 1 on the country chart; some stations listed Bob Wills Is Still the King first. A studio version followed in March 1976 on the soundtrack of the Roy Rogers film Mackintosh & T.J., produced by Jennings with Ritchie Albright — shorter, tidier, and ending with a sly false ending and a fiddle quote from Faded Love, the Western swing signature the live cut had left out.
The Long Reign
The song’s afterlife has been worthy of its subject. The live version was chosen for Classic Country Music: A Smithsonian Collection (1990), the Smithsonian Institution’s four-volume canon of one hundred essential country recordings. Asleep at the Wheel, who did more than anyone to keep Wills’s music itself alive, recorded the song with Clint Black for the 1999 tribute Ride with Bob, and again in 2015 with Shooter Jennings — Waylon’s son — on Still the King. Both versions of Jennings’s recording remain staples of the satellite channel Willie’s Roadhouse, where the joke can still be heard landing in its original target’s own house.
And in October 2006 came the coronation nobody could have predicted: the Rolling Stones, playing Zilker Park in Austin on their A Bigger Bang tour, stopped down mid-set to perform Bob Wills Is Still the King, with Ronnie Wood — of all people — on pedal steel guitar. The performance was preserved on The Biggest Bang concert DVD. A song written as a rhyming letter to settle a booking feud had become, thirty years on, the official anthem of Texas music itself — the one a band of Londoners reached for when they wanted to tell an Austin crowd they understood where they were. Bob Wills is still the king. Waylon made sure of it, even if that wasn’t quite what he set out to do. Somewhere in the afterlife of the joke is the best punchline of all: the song now belongs to Texas the way its subject once did, played wherever Texans gather to remind themselves who they are — which is precisely the fate Jennings, grinning on that Opry House stage in 1974, seems to have intended all along.