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Spinning landed in North America shortly after World War II. It democratized fishing almost overnight. With spinning gear, anyone could make a long, smooth cast on his first try, with none of those backlashes that plagued level-wind baitcasters or any of that awkward back-and-forth flailing around that frustrated the beginning fly caster.

Spinning gave fishing to the people, and bass, particularly largemouths, were the people’s fish. By the middle of this century, both largemouths and smallmouths had migrated to every state in the lower 48. Almost every body of fresh water held bass. If it didn’t, somebody transplanted them. Bass were accessible and abundant, and they grew big. They were aggressive and impetuous, unlike the moody trout. Bass were blue-collar fish; trout were high-society. In a bar-room brawl, you’d put your money on any bass over the toughest trout in the joint.

It’s entirely consistent with the American spirit that bass fishing would become a competitive sport and a big business. The Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.) was founded in the 1960s, and soon Jimmy Houston and Roland Martin and Bill Dance became household names. Industries competed with each other to invent artificial lures that bass would eat. Bass lures were called “baits,” and they had down-to-earth designations — “plastic worms” and “jig-and-pigs,” “stickbaits” and “buzzbaits,” “spinnerbaits” and “crankbaits.” They were made of rubber and plastic and metal, and they came in myriad colors, many of which could be found nowhere in nature, but which, their creators claimed, drove bass nuts. They all worked, of course. Bass eat anything. But an endorsement from a bass champion guaranteed big sales.

Other enterprising businessmen designed boats and motors and electronics specifically for bass fishermen. They adapted space-age materials to the construction of lines, rods and reels, and addicted bassmen bought that stuff, too.

With money on the line, competitive bass fishermen began to study the habits of their quarry and the ways that bass behavior correlated with season and weather and water temperature and other variables. They studied the habits and behavior of bass prey, too, so that they could imitate them with the shape, color, size, and action of their lures. They made a science of bass fishing. And they sure could catch ‘em.

Tournament bass fishing quickly spread north and west until, by the late 70s or so, bass clubs were sponsoring contests all over the country. Recreational, non-competitive bass fishing, or course, mirrored the exploding popularity of the tournaments. For every competitive pro, there were hundreds of amateurs who trailered boats, hunted bass obsessively with fishfinders and spinning rods, and dreamed of joining the tournament circuit.

The arrival of spinning in the 1940s inevitably produced a decline in the popularity of fly fishing in general, and in fly fishing for bass in particular. Jack Ellis calls the first three post-war decades “The Dark Age” of fly-rod bass-bug fishing. Throwing bugs from a clunky old rowboat, compared to the new high-tech methods, struck with-it anglers of that era as old-fashioned, ineffective, and vaguely amusing. Typical of the new attitude was that of outdoor scribe Jason Lucas, who wrote in 1947: “Bass bugging is an extremely crude form of fly fishing, if fly fishing it can be called . . . A child of average mentality should learn bass bugging in a few minutes.” Bass fishing, under the influence of Lucas and many others, was becoming a science for spin- and baitcasters, and while it wasn’t to become apparent until sometime in the 1970s, the bass-boat/high-tech/big-money tournament revolution had begun.

The commercial market for deerhair bass bugs dried up during the post-war years, but a few diehards continued to fool around at the vise. Roy Yates created a deerhair version of the Wilder-Dilg feathered minnow — a design he adapted from Don Gapen’s Muddler, and which he called The Deacon. A few years later, H. G. Tapply created his higher-floating, noisier, all-deerhair version of The Deacon. He never got around to giving it a name, so, by default, it came to be called Tap’s Bug.

Hard-bodied fly-rod bugs continued to be manufactured, and new materials such as foam and molded plastic were introduced. But the designs didn’t change, as lure manufacturers’ creative energies shifted to “baits” that could be cast with spinning and baitcasting outfits. That particular market was exploding.

The pleasures of top-water fly-rodding for bass continued to be chronicled in books and magazines through the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s by that era’s most respected fishing writers, notably Joe Brooks, John Alden Knight, A. J. McClane, Harold F. Blaisdell, Tom Nixon, Ray Bergman, H. G. Tapply, Charles Waterman, and Tom McNally. All of these esteemed angling gurus wrote fondly of fly-rod bass-bug fishing, but only Nixon fished for bass exclusively with the fly rod, and Brooks’ book was the only one that focused exclusively on bass-bugging. The other writers all fished widely, for a variety of species, and with whatever tackle promised success. You could catch bass on the fly rod, they insisted. But you could catch them other ways, too. As Bergman lamented, there seemed to be a “growing apathy toward fly fishing on the part of bass anglers.”

So in the “Dark Age” of the post-war high-tech revolution, bass bugging became a novelty in the popular mind, a harmless (and “crude”) sport that was being kept alive by nostalgic old-timers who’d sometimes rather flail around with fly rods than catch a lot of bass.

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The revival of bass-bug fishing — what Nick Lyons has called “the bass-fly revolution” — began in the 1970s and can be credited largely to the efforts of Dave Whitlock who, in Jack Ellis’s words, “made bass bugging respectable.” Whitlock, says Ellis, “brought dignity, artistry, and class to bass bugging. He was the first famous bass bugger (there’s got to be a better term) in history who did not, with the lone exception of Messinger, occasionally use the casting rod.”

Whitlock’s bass-fly designs — subsurface as well as topwater — are colorful, sleek, and imitative, and he writes about fly-rod bassing with knowledgeable enthusiasm. “Fly fishing for bass,” he says, “may well be the most exciting, pleasurable, and consistently rewarding method of fishing that exists today in North America. . . . Bass are terrific fun on a fly rod!”

Whitlock devised bass flies and developed fly-fishing techniques, he says, by “studying and adapting the successful methods of the saltwater fly fishers and the spin and baitcasting bass fishermen.” His flies are complicated and eye-catching — to the angler, certainly, and probably to bass as well. They imitate not only natural bass prey, but also the lures that spin-fishermen cast in their tournaments.

Those who contend that it’s the wiggle, glug and burble that makes bass gobble flies might feel that Whitlock dresses his bass flies with unnecessary and redundant appendages and decorations. His Whit Hair-Bug Series, for example, are basic Tap’s bugs in a variety of color combinations, complete with eyes, multi-material tails, glitter, and rubber legs. Whether Whitlock’s elegant creations catch more bass than simpler, less imitative flies is debatable, but they surely have served the purpose of convincing an ever-widening population of anglers to take up fly-fishing for bass. His various deerhair divers, underwater swimmers, bottom flies and jigs look and behave even more like actual bass prey than their metal and plastic counterparts favored by the tournament bassmen.

Whitlock’s imitative hair-and-feather bass flies — along with his enthusiastic promotion of fly fishing for bass — have converted a generation of trout anglers, who are predisposed to the concept of imitation, to the fun of fly-rod bass fishing. His bugs and lures offer fly fishermen lifelike imitations of all known bass prey — and valid options to virtually every lure the tournament bassers can throw with a spinning or baitcasting rod. For every stickbait and crankbait and jig and rubber worm, there is a corresponding Whitlock creation for the fly fisherman — the Whit Hair Bug, Mouserat, Wigglelegs Frog, Snakey, Eeelworm Streamer, Hare Water Pup, Chamois Spring Lizard, Haregrub, Water Snake, Golden Shiner, Water Dog, Sand Eel, Deerhair Gerbubble Bug . . . the list goes on.

Other contemporary bass-fly inventors and practitioners such as Larry Dahlberg, best known for his innovative deerhair diver, John Betts, Bob Clouser, Dick Stewart, A. D. Livingston, Harry Murray, Jack Ellis, C. Boyd Pfeiffer, and Jack Gartside have made important contributions to the Whitlock bass-fly revival. Iconic angling writers like Nick Lyons and John Gierach chronicle the simple, poetic joys of fly-rod bugging. We probably don’t really need an arsenal of imitative flies to catch bass, but for the sake of the sport of fly-rod bassing, I’m glad we have them. Their variety gives us genuine respectability, the inspiration to experiment at the vise and on the water, and, when the fishing is slow, legitimate options to old-fashioned hair and cork bugs.

But on a soft summer evening I’m usually quite content to tie on something not much different from a strip-skin bob — a Henshall Bug, maybe, or a yellow Tap’s Bug. I’ll plop it near a fallen tree, watch the rings widen and dissipate before making it go ker-PLOOP, and wait for that sudden implosion of water. It reminds me that I am not that far removed from the Seminole Indians of the 17th century. I think it’s good for my soul to stay in touch with my roots.