Wyble Through the Years
1943
Wyble joins Bob Wills’
Texas Playboys
1922
Jimmy Wyble born on
January 25, 1922, in
Port Arthur, Texas
1953
Wyble releases
The Jimmy Wyble
Quintet album
1948
Wyble studies
with hero
Barney Kessel
1959
Wyble performs
on Frank Sinatra
with the Red
Norvo Quintet:
Live in Australia,
1959 album
1934
Wyble picks up
his first guitar
1956
Wyble begins performing
with Red Norvo and
Benny Goodman
1970
Wyble starts giving
lessons, instructing
Steve Lukather, Larry
Koonse, Howard Alden,
and many others
1977
Wyble releases
Etudes album
1979
Wyble publishes
The Art of Two-Line
Improvisation book
1980s
Wyble retires from
performing to care
for wife Lily, who suffers from muscular
dystrophy
2001
Wyble releases an
updated version of
The Art of Two-Line
Improvisation with
edits and music by
David Oakes
2010
Wyble dies on January
16, 2010, of heart failure
at his home in Altadena,
California
mix of elements that exist in his playing
due to where he grew up and the influences
that surrounded him. He definitely has
some of that New Orleans-style feel, even
Cajun mixed with this Texas swing style
that would be something you would iden-
tify with Spade Cooley or Bob Wills. Mixed
with a New York jazz sensibility.”
Wyble moved to Houston after high
school and played with a variety of bands,
in addition to scoring a gig on KTRH radio
station performing short snippets of tunes
used in broadcasts. His teenage ability to
read music was crucial in scoring this gig
and was an indicator of his future profi-
ciency with charts and sheet music.
By the early ’40s, his friends and band-mates were trading guitars for rifles and
shipping out to World War II battlefields in
Europe and Asia. Wyble, physically small to
begin with, had poor eyesight that exempted him from the draft. However, he managed to enlist in the Army and was assigned
to a marching band. Honorably discharged
after a year, Wyble returned to Houston and
began performing with a group of country
music pals, including Cameron Hill.
In a 2007 interview with Jim Carlton
published in Just Jazz Guitar magazine, Wyble
describes Hill as a “guitar player who didn’t
read a note but had a super ear. He could play
several of Charlie Christian’s solos, like ‘Flying
Home’ and ‘Soft Winds’ and we’d get togeth-
er and make a two-guitar thing happen.”
Along with Hill, Wyble received a big
career break when asked to join Bob Wills’
Texas Playboys in late 1943. The group
toured extensively and ultimately went to
CBS Studios in Hollywood to record ver-
sions of Wills’ staples “Ida Red,” “Take Me
Back to Tulsa,” and “Roly Poly,” which stayed
on the charts for a number of weeks in 1946.
Crossover Kid
Wyble returned to Texas and enrolled at
the Houston Conservatory of Music, but
only studied a short while before joining
Spade Cooley’s band. During his tenure
in Cooley’s outfit, Wyble was featured in
a 1950 Fender advertisement, decked out
in Western shirt and dark rimmed glasses,
holding a black Esquire model with a white
pickguard and his name emblazoned on the
lower side of the body. Other photos from
the era show him with a blonde Esquire.
Over the years, Wyble played a variety of
guitars and chose whatever was best for the
particular application, as opposed to stick-
ing with a single trademark instrument.
In addition to the Fenders, he also played
Epiphones, Guilds, Gibsons, and Hofners,
and later in life, instruments by Roger
Borys, Paul McGill, and others.
