Billboard Artist Of The Day: Six Grammy Noms Honor Bob Wills Tribute

The Wheel's current tribute package, "Ride With Bob" (DreamWorks Nashville), outstripped all other Nashville projects with its six Grammy nominations. Benson says it's just the continuation of modest tributes he had planned to honor fellow Texan Wills.

Even so, he was stunned by the across-the-board nominations for the album, which include best country album and two nods for best country collaboration with vocals.

He's perhaps most proud of the Grammy nomination for best longform music video for "The Making Of 'Ride With Bob.' " And justifiably so. The video is an intimate, up-close look at the studio collaboration of artists ranging from Lyle Lovett singing with Shawn Colvin; Merle Haggard jamming with the Squirrel Nut Zippers; Willie Nelson jumping with the Manhattan Transfer; Dwight Yoakam, Tim McGraw, Dixie Chicks, and other contemporary country artists.

Interspersed are extensive clips of Wills and his Texas Playboys segueing into the current versions of his hits, plus visits with veteran Texas Playboys pickers Johnny Gimble, Herb Remington, and Tommy Allsup.

"It's Count Basie with fiddles," says Vince Gill. Yoakam notes, "We all owe Bob Wills our hats, our boots, our fancy cowboy suits, and our buses."

Benson says that before becoming a latter-day preserver of western swing, he was a film student at Antioch College, and that's why he felt it was important to capture a filmed capsule of the artists doing the music.

"I've wanted to do that for every album I've ever made," he says. "So me and a friend who's a director and cameraman and an Asleep At The Wheel and Bob Wills nut, Dan Karlok, decided to do it. It was just him and a camera and me and a few well-placed lights. There was no crew; it was unobtrusive. What you see is what happened. If you come in with a big crew and lights and a big production, you intimidate people, and you wouldn't capture that. So this took us a year to do.

"Now we're showing it," Benson continues. "TNN showed it, but nobody saw it. We showed it at the Austin Film Festival, and it got a huge response. They cheered and laughed and yelled all through it. I'm talking now to PBS and the Sundance Channel."

This actually is the Wheel's second Bob Wills tribute. The first, done seven years ago on the late Liberty Records, also won a Grammy, and Benson says he planned a four-album set at the time.

"Jimmy Bowen [then president of Liberty] said, 'Yeah, right, Ray,' but he let me do a double-album, 18-cut set. So, we didn't do 'San Antonio Rose,' we didn't do 'Faded Love,' 'Milkcow Blues,' all the ones we do on this album, what I would call Bob Wills' hits," Benson says.

"We had