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From: Tom Bingham
Date: December 23, 2002
Bob was a pretty darn good singer if you don't mind him tinkering with the meter of the tune the same way he did with his fiddle. He had this fondness for rushing the beat which can be disconcerting until you get into it and accept it as his personal style. On Liberty, he did an album called _Bob Wills Sings and Plays_, which features a fair amount of his singing. I'm particularly fond of an unusual version of "Yearning", with Vicki Carr singing a wordless obbligato in back of Bob's lead. I played it for my class at Chautauqua Institution last week, and they quite enjoyed it as well. But generally, Bob was at his best singing blues, and you can hear in his voice that this was what he really wanted to sing. His style is largely derived from Emmitt Miller's, but without the racist overtones that Miller put into his singing.