Published: May 21, 2008 10:29 am      

Baker has a tune

Waurika musician keeps western swing alive

WAURIKA — How do you go from being a rock and country performer to becoming a devotee of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and one of the world’s major promoters of Western swing?

If you’re Henry Baker, you just go with the flow as your band evolves.

“I’d had a band since the mid-’60s and we kind of went through all the phases, from rock ’n’ roll to country and then to Southern rock — Charlie Daniels and Pure Prairie League, the Amazing Rhythm Aces and like that,” Baker said, sitting in the living room of the home he shares with wife, Doris Ann, and three dogs on H Street in Waurika.

“Along about 1980, I needed a steel (guitar) man, and my guitar player knew Gene Crownover, who used to be one of the Texas Playboys,” Baker recalled.

“I was living in Bartlesville and Gene would come up from Tulsa, and pretty soon Glenn Rhees, who played sax with Bob, and Clarence Cagle, who’d been one of Bob’s piano players, and Curly Lewis, who’d been one of (Wills’) fiddle players, were sitting in with us.”

As faces in the band changed and the replacements all seemed to be musicians with a tie to Bob Wills, Henry Baker’s light bulb lit up.

“I realized we’d be stupid to play anything but what those guys knew,” he said. “They were the best quality Western swing musicians in the world. So we started playing nothing but Western swing, and I fell right into it.”

When Baker fell, he fell hard. He became consumed by the legacy of Wills and the Texas Playboys, who introduced the world to a new musical form in the 1930s, by combining country with elements of big band, jazz and blues to create Western Swing.

Wills’ standards like “San Antonio Rose,” “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” “Big Balls in Cowtown,” “Stay All Night” and “Milk Cow Blues” are country music classics. Wills and The Playboys made Oklahoma a second home, and his familiar outburst of “Ahhh, haaa” was heard often at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa. “Faded Love” is the official country song of Oklahoma.

In 1982, Baker, a Wewoka native, joined Crownover on a trip to Turkey, Texas, the hometown of Wills. Crownover was in charge of acquiring bands for the annual Bob Wills Day hosted by the town.

After that first taste of Turkey, Baker not only started making annual Bob Wills Day visits, he began doing sound work for the festival and eventually became one of the performers, when he sat in on guitar for a former Playboy who couldn’t attend.

Bob Wills Day was originally a two-day event; a Friday and Saturday festival, which featured concerts and jam sessions. During the festival, the town of 494 swells to over 20,000, and as Baker became more involved in preserving the music of Wills and the Texas Playboys and Western swing in general, his vision expanded.

So did Bob Wills Day.

“I thought the festival needed to expand to three or four days. So, in 1996, we started doing the Thursday shows with members of the Playboys,” he said.

Then Baker stumbled into an opportunity to spread “the gospel” of Wills and Western swing.

The town of Turkey had taken ownership of the community’s crumbling and abandoned Assembly of God Church. City leaders planned to tear down the building, but Baker had an alternative. “In 2000, I bought that old church for $1,000,” he said.

The Church of Western Swing was born.

“The Bob Wills Foundation was having jam sessions, and we were doing it out of a house at first,” he explained. “It had got to the point that there were 75 musicians inside the house, and another 150 listening outside. And that’s when I decided to get the church.”

Baker is a plumber and electrician in “real life.” That’s what brought him and Doris Ann, who works at Westbrook Nursing Home, to Waurika in 1999. He’s used those skills to become so heavily involved in renovating the Church of Western Swing.

“It’s still a job in progress,” he said, “but we’ve put in a stage and a floor, theater seats and bathrooms. There are bedrooms and a kitchen in the back, so it’s become a home away from home for me and Doris now.”

Although Bob Wills Day is officially a three-day affair in late April, Baker said, “We actually start playing at The Church on the Friday before it officially starts, so it’s now become nine days of music.

“We have an organized band playing at The Church, but there are several jam sessions around town. And if a musician comes to The Church that I know is a super picker, I’ll put them up on the stage with the band.”

Baker plays guitar and fiddle with the Church of Western Swing Band and Doris Ann often sings vocals, which is what they were doing when Stuart Englert stopped in on the 2007 Bob Wills Day festival and gathered material for a story that appeared around the nation in the April 6 edition of American Profile magazine.

Turkey is not the Bakers’ only gig, however, nor is the only way the pair spread the “gospel” of Wills and Western swing. They’re familiar faces and musicians at music festivals throughout the country, and Henry has been inducted into the Western Swing Hall of Fame in Sacramento, Calif., and the Society of Western Swing Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas.

Part of the couple’s mission is to keep Western swing alive.

“There are a lot of Western swing groups and societies around the country that are keeping the music alive,” Henry Baker said. “At the Saturday show in Turkey this year, the band took an intermission at The Church and we had six young musicians get up and play, including two brothers from Chico, Texas — Coleman and Austin Smith — who are great fiddle players.

“There’s a girl named Ginny Mack, who’s 22 or 23 years old, who plays accordion and sings and writes Western swing songs. And her brother, who’s 18, plays guitar.

“The music isn’t going to die out when there’s kids like that coming up.”