RAMONA REED & BOB WILLS - Little Girl, Little Girl

Ramona grew up on a farm near Talihina, Oklahoma and by the time she was 15, she was singing for a Saturday morning radio show in McAlester, Oklahoma. She sang on the Grand Ole Opry for the first time when she was 17.

After college in Denver, Colorado, and then two years in Nashville, she moved to Dallas, Texas where the Bob Wills Ranch House had just opened. She auditioned for Bob which led to two years of touring and performing with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She performed at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa many times with Bob Wills and sang with Johnnie Lee Wills at county fairs.

Of her many hit songs, she sang and yodeled “I want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” which was produced by Oklahoma’s Tommy Allsup.

She was voted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2009. The induction class included Rocky Frisco and Carrie Underwood. The Grand Ole Opry paid tribute to Ramona in 2020 as she celebrated the 70th Anniversary of her time on the Opry while observing her 90th birthday.

James Robert Wills (March 6, 1905 – May 13, 1975) was an American Western swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Considered by music authorities as the founder of Western swing, he was known widely as the King of Western Swing (although Spade Cooley self-promoted the moniker "King of Western Swing" from 1942 to 1969).

Wills formed several bands and played radio stations around the South and West until he formed the Texas Playboys in 1934 with Wills on fiddle, Tommy Duncan on piano and vocals, rhythm guitarist June Whalin, tenor banjoist Johnnie Lee Wills, and Kermit Whalin, who played steel guitar and bass. Oklahoma guitar player Eldon Shamblin joined the band in 1937 bringing jazzy influence and arrangements. The band played regularly on Tulsa, Oklahoma, radio station KVOO and added Leon McAuliffe on steel guitar, pianist Al Stricklin, drummer Smokey Dacus, and a horn section that expanded the band's sound. Wills favored jazz-like arrangements and the band found national popularity into the 1940s with such hits as "Steel Guitar Rag", "New San Antonio Rose", "Smoke on the Water", "Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima", and "New Spanish Two Step".

Wills and the Texas Playboys recorded with several publishers and companies, including Vocalion, Okeh, Columbia, and MGM, frequently moving. In 1950, he had two top 10 hits, "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" and "Faded Love", which were his last hits for a decade. Throughout the 1950s, he struggled with poor health and tenuous finances, but continued to perform frequently despite the decline in popularity of his earlier music as rock and roll took over. Wills had a heart attack in 1962, and a second one the next year, which forced him to disband the Playboys, although Wills continued to perform solo.

The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted Wills in 1968 and the Texas State Legislature honored him for his contribution to American music.

In 1972, Wills accepted a citation from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in Nashville. He was recording an album with fan Merle Haggard in 1973 when a stroke left him comatose until his death in 1975. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Wills and the Texas Playboys in 1999.

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