Bob Wills Museum

James Robert Wills was born near Kosse in Central Texas in 1905, and his family moved to Hall County in 1913. His father and grandfather were fiddlers, and the boy learned their frontier dance tunes while picking cotton beside Black workers from whom he learned the blues. He played his first ranch dance in 1915 and kept playing them across West Texas for fourteen years, and he cut hair at a barbershop in Turkey between dances. Those years made western swing: fiddle music played with the heat of the blues and the swing of jazz.

He left for Fort Worth in 1929. After the Light Crust Doughboys he formed the Texas Playboys in 1934 and broadcast from KVOO in Tulsa, adding drums and horns. "New San Antonio Rose" made him a national name in 1940. He died in 1975 and is buried in Tulsa, but Turkey, where he spent much of his childhood, claims him; the welcome sign says Home of Bob Wills, and a monument stands on Main Street.

The museum is in the old Turkey school. It holds his boots, shirts and hats, his father's fiddle, the tools from the barbershop where he worked, and posters from the western films he starred in. On the last weekend of April, a town of about 300 people takes in thousands for Bob Wills Day, a fundraiser with dances and jam sessions run by the Bob Wills Foundation, and visiting musicians stay at the 1927 Hotel Turkey.