The Rolling Stones – Bob Wills Is Still The King (Live)

Mick Jagger In A City Park, Singing A Country Song That Was Never Really About Bob Wills

On October 22, 2006, the Rolling Stones played Zilker Park in Austin, Texas — their first ever performance in the self-declared Live Music Capital of the World. They ran through decades of classics. Then, deep into the set, Mick Jagger opened his mouth and sang a Waylon Jennings country song to 100,000 Texans who promptly lost their minds. “Bob Wills Is Still the King” had been written in 1975 by a man who openly admitted he wasn’t even a big Bob Wills fan. Thirty-one years later, the Rolling Stones were performing it in Austin like they meant every word.

The original was Waylon Jennings’ most quietly subversive creation. Written on a plane between Dallas and Austin — as Waylon himself announced every time he played it live — it wore the clothing of a straightforward tribute to the King of Western Swing while actually serving as a good-natured broadside aimed at Willie Nelson. Waylon had grown tired of watching Willie conquer the Austin scene and, as he put it, wondered if his old friend was getting a little too big for his britches. The line that made Willie wince was surgical in its precision: “It’s the home of Willie Nelson, the home of western swing / He’ll be the first to tell you, Bob Wills is still the king.” After Waylon performed it at the Texas Opry House — one of Willie’s regular haunts — he walked offstage and straight toward his friend to see, as Willie later recalled, “if I might be wounded.” Willie laughed. That was the end of it.

The song appeared on Jennings’ 1975 album Dreaming My Dreams and as the B-side to “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way”, eventually cracking the country Top 10. Its live version — recorded at the same Texas Opry House sessions — became the definitive take, with Waylon’s spoken introduction and pauses for audience reaction giving it the quality of a campfire story rather than a pop single. The studio cut added a fiddle outro quoting Bob Wills’ own “Faded Love”, just to make the tribute feel genuine after all the ribbing. When Waylon played it at one of Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics, the crowd responded so wildly that Waylon later wrote in his memoir that things got genuinely out of hand on the audience floor. Western swing had apparently never sounded so dangerous.

Keith Richards had long been the country music conscience of the Rolling Stones — the man who had pulled the band toward Gram Parsons, pedal steel guitars, and the rougher edges of American roots music since the early 1970s. It was no surprise that the Stones knew the song. What nobody expected was for them to play it in Austin, in public, for the first time, without warning. The performance — captured for the live concert DVD The Biggest Bang, released in 2007 — features Jagger navigating the lyric with obvious relish, fully inhabiting the character of a Texas honky-tonk devotee. It is one of the most unlikely and completely convincing moments in the Stones’ live catalogue.

Asleep at the Wheel had kept the song alive through the decades — recording it with Clint Black in 1999 for the tribute album Ride With Bob and again with Waylon’s son Shooter Jennings in 2015. The song itself has outlived almost everyone in it. Waylon Jennings died in 2002. Bob Wills had been gone since 1975, the same year the song was recorded. Willie Nelson — still out there, still playing Austin — remains the last man standing in a lyric that once served as a gentle attempt to humble him.

There is something genuinely moving about Mick Jagger standing in a park in Austin and declaring that Bob Wills is still the king. Not because of the performance itself — though it is joyous — but because of what it represents: a chain of musical inheritance stretching from Texas dance halls in the 1930s through outlaw country in the 1970s to a rock and roll band from London paying their dues to all of it. “It don’t matter who’s in Austin,” the song says. In this case, it happened to be the Rolling Stones. And they knew enough to bow.