Cain's Ballroom and the King of Western Swing

The building at four twenty-three North Main Street in Tulsa has a spring loaded wooden dance floor. The springs absorb the shock of thousands of dancing feet, giving the floor a slight give that dancers have described, for nearly a hundred years, as unlike any other floor they have stood on. The building is Cain's Ballroom. The floor is the reason people came from across Oklahoma to dance there, and it is part of why what happened inside it sounds the way it does.

In nineteen thirty-four, a bandleader from Turkey, Texas named Bob Wills arrived in Tulsa with his band, the Texas Playboys, and began radio broadcasts on KVOO, soon moving their dances to Cain's Ballroom. The broadcast went out on KVOO radio, which carried to most of Oklahoma and large parts of the surrounding states. Wills played a style he and his band had been inventing for several years, mixing western swing, fiddle music, big-band jazz improvisation, and blues in a combination that had no clean genre name yet. He called it western swing, eventually. The radio audience called it what they danced to.

Wills and the Texas Playboys broadcast live from Cain's five and sometimes six days a week. They cut records. They appeared in films. By the late nineteen thirties, Bob Wills was the most popular musician in the American Southwest. His recording of San Antonio Rose, released in nineteen forty, sold more than a million copies. His band played Carnegie Hall.

He kept coming back to Cain's. His home base stayed in Tulsa until the early nineteen forties, when the war scattered the band and the broadcast moved. He died in nineteen seventy-five. The Cain's Ballroom is still open. The floor still bounces.