For the second year in a row, the Ozarks Studies Institute will serve as a sponsor of the annual showcase gathering of the Western Swing Music Society of the Southwest. The Springfield showcase, one of five held each year in various locations in Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, which is now in its sixth year, will be held in the Shrine Mosque from Thursday, May 16th through Saturday, May 18th. 

Western Swing music goes back to the time of the band Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, which got started in 1934. Spade Cooley out in southern California was another big musician and band leader associated with Western Swing. For decades the lead vocalist for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys was Leon Rausch, who was born and raised in Billings, Missouri, just southwest of Springfield. Rausch died in 2019 at the age of 91. 

At the showcase last year, Tom Peters, Dean of Libraries at MSU,
and director of the Ozarks Studies Institute, showed some clips
from the Ozark Jubilee when Bob Wills performed. The showcase attendees really enjoyed seeing Bob Wills perform on the Jubilee in the late Fifties. Wills died in 1975 at the age of 70.

WSMSS (Western Swing Music Society of the Southwest) is a Texas based Non-Profit organization founded in 1998 by five musicians. These founders envisioned a group of artists playing and singing Western Swing music as popularized by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Spade Cooley, Leon McAuliffe, Tex Williams, Hank Thompson, Asleep at the Wheel and many others!