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| Prick! |
This one’s messy. It also features a horrific murder, something I don’t come across much in researching musicians, but it’s the wobble between the online sources that complicates the tale of Spade Cooley. There is no question as to the brutality of the murder, and Cooley’s plain guilt in it. To start at the beginning...
The man who became Spade Cooley was born in Grand, Oklahoma in 1910, but with the name Donnell Clyde Cooley. He grew up poor and his family moved West, but sources don’t agree on where or when. Because Wikipedia’s timeline makes no damn sense, and because the dates in Wide Open Country's bio don’t track, I’m going with the basic chronology/destination in musicianguide.com’s bio: Cooley moved with his family to Oregon in 1914, when he was four, and that’s where he grew up and, quite possibly, attended Chemawa (or Chimewa) School, one of the notorious boarding schools for Native Americans. But, again, that doesn’t really track.
He developed a curiosity about music and started on stringed instruments in his childhood years. Regardless of whether Cooley started learning from a friend of his dad’s, he played in school orchestras through his childhood, first on cello, later on violin; he also picked up fiddling by working barn dances for money. No doubt more consequentially, Cooley married a girl named Ann when he was 17 (and she was [?]; also, no last name), and moved to California. Or, as musicianguide.com puts it (which gets at why I’m wary of the source), “In 1931 the Cooley family moved to a farm in Modesto, California.” (Which Cooley family?) Somewhere during this time, he picked up his nickname from a poker game where he won three times in a row on spade flushes.
Determined the escape a life in farm-work that drew both him and the entire “Okie/Dust Bowl” diaspora, Cooley started to poke around Hollywood with an eye to a career in entertainment. After a couple trips, he landed work steady enough move his family down to Tinseltown. He found his first stable work in the movies, working as a stand-in for Roy Rogers, “with whom he had more than a passing resemblance.” He also built a name on the burgeoning swing-club circuit as a fiddler, and even toured with Rogers’ touring band, Foy Willing's Riders of the Purple Sage. Between that work and an assist from his manager, Bobbi Bennett, Cooley landed a job with Jimmy Wakely, the bandleader for Gene Autry’s radio show, Melody Ranch. Wakely also headlined at the Venice Pier Ballroom. And there go the 1930s...
When Wakely scored a movie contract with Universal, leadership of the Venice Pier Ballroom orchestra passed to Cooley. Due, in part, to playing the music for the aforementioned Okie/Dust Bowl diaspora - one sourced called Nashville a rival sphere to Hollywood when it came to country - his fiddle playing had become popular, but Cooley stood out even more with his “electric Western swing performances - featuring footwork inspired by his days as an amateur boxer.” He pretty much killed it through the 1940s, setting an early high-water mark of 18 months for a residency at the Venice Pier Ballroom and racking up one movie credit after another – e.g., “such movies as the Bob Crosby film The Singing Sheriff, and in other films, including Chatterbox, The Singing Bandit, Outlaws of the Rockies, Rockin' in the Rockies (with the Three Stooges), Texas Panhandle, Square Dance Jubilee, and Everybody's Dancin!.” As a result...
“His career ballooned, much like his ego.”
That’s from Wide Open Country and it tees up Spade Cooley’s dark side. He was a reckless womanizer – in an unpublished manuscript, Bennett recorded arranging 10 abortions for his client in a single year – but he also jealously guarded his reputation, as well as his self-esteem. When Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (profiled here) rolled into “the Nashville of the West Coast,” Cooley’s outfit felt the heat of competition for time at venues. The competition came to a head when one of them bumped Cooley’s band for Bob Wills’. Cooley immediately demanded a “battle of the bands” and he acted up throughout – i.e., “During the performance, Cooley insulted Wills multiple times, often playing Wills' signature songs.” Whether he won, or just declared himself the winner, Cooley staked his claim to the title “King of Western Swing” - and with some justification (Cooley’s management had promoted him under the title since 1942). Musicianguide.com quoted another source to speak to the justice of the decision:
“According to Kurt Wolff in Country Music: The Rough Guide: "The Hollywood socialite and his orchestra were nowhere near as rowdy and loose around the edges as the great Texas swing bands of the 1930s; Cooley perfected a smoother, cooler, and in many ways slicker sound that was far more orchestrated than the music of [Bob] Wills or [Milton] Brown. The electric guitar, for instance, had a rounder sound, the strings were denser and arranged in a 'section' compared to the bright twin-fiddle sound of [Wills's] Texas Playboys.”
Cooley’s recording career take off around the same time. His scored his first hit single in 1944 with “Shame on You” (released on Okeh) and followed it up with six more Top 10 hits, including “Detour,” “Crazy ‘Cause I Love You,” and “Forgive Me One More Time,” (ooof, the foreshadowing keeps getting darker). At some point in all of this, a singer named Ella Mae Evans caught Cooley’s ever-wandering eye. He pulled some strings to get her into his orchestra and, over time, made her both a featured singer and his wife (he left “Ann” for her, in other words).
The mid-1940s got a little rocky for Cooley – e.g., he lost his lead vocalist, Tex Willaims (famous for this (great) song; but also a vocal component Cooley borrowed from Wills), along with most of the rest of his band, and he had to endure a second musicians strike – but he landed on both feet in 1947 with his starring role on the Hoffman Hayride television series. The show did quite well: apart from beating the nationally broadcast Milton Berle Show in the LA market, it won a couple local Emmys (1952 to 1953) and had the clout to call in guests like Frankie Laine, Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore. That kept Cooley going for a while, but the network canceled Cooley’s show in 1956 and replaced it with another act, one all but certain to stir up the ghost of Bob Wills (Cliffie Stone's Hometown Jamboree). After one last absurd stab at doing something big – the man attempted to build a waterpark in the Mojave, for Christ’s sake – Cooley grew frustrated about the end of all that. He hit the bottle as well, and when he got drunk and frustrated, he unleashed his demons on Ella Mae.
The man who became Spade Cooley was born in Grand, Oklahoma in 1910, but with the name Donnell Clyde Cooley. He grew up poor and his family moved West, but sources don’t agree on where or when. Because Wikipedia’s timeline makes no damn sense, and because the dates in Wide Open Country's bio don’t track, I’m going with the basic chronology/destination in musicianguide.com’s bio: Cooley moved with his family to Oregon in 1914, when he was four, and that’s where he grew up and, quite possibly, attended Chemawa (or Chimewa) School, one of the notorious boarding schools for Native Americans. But, again, that doesn’t really track.
He developed a curiosity about music and started on stringed instruments in his childhood years. Regardless of whether Cooley started learning from a friend of his dad’s, he played in school orchestras through his childhood, first on cello, later on violin; he also picked up fiddling by working barn dances for money. No doubt more consequentially, Cooley married a girl named Ann when he was 17 (and she was [?]; also, no last name), and moved to California. Or, as musicianguide.com puts it (which gets at why I’m wary of the source), “In 1931 the Cooley family moved to a farm in Modesto, California.” (Which Cooley family?) Somewhere during this time, he picked up his nickname from a poker game where he won three times in a row on spade flushes.
Determined the escape a life in farm-work that drew both him and the entire “Okie/Dust Bowl” diaspora, Cooley started to poke around Hollywood with an eye to a career in entertainment. After a couple trips, he landed work steady enough move his family down to Tinseltown. He found his first stable work in the movies, working as a stand-in for Roy Rogers, “with whom he had more than a passing resemblance.” He also built a name on the burgeoning swing-club circuit as a fiddler, and even toured with Rogers’ touring band, Foy Willing's Riders of the Purple Sage. Between that work and an assist from his manager, Bobbi Bennett, Cooley landed a job with Jimmy Wakely, the bandleader for Gene Autry’s radio show, Melody Ranch. Wakely also headlined at the Venice Pier Ballroom. And there go the 1930s...
When Wakely scored a movie contract with Universal, leadership of the Venice Pier Ballroom orchestra passed to Cooley. Due, in part, to playing the music for the aforementioned Okie/Dust Bowl diaspora - one sourced called Nashville a rival sphere to Hollywood when it came to country - his fiddle playing had become popular, but Cooley stood out even more with his “electric Western swing performances - featuring footwork inspired by his days as an amateur boxer.” He pretty much killed it through the 1940s, setting an early high-water mark of 18 months for a residency at the Venice Pier Ballroom and racking up one movie credit after another – e.g., “such movies as the Bob Crosby film The Singing Sheriff, and in other films, including Chatterbox, The Singing Bandit, Outlaws of the Rockies, Rockin' in the Rockies (with the Three Stooges), Texas Panhandle, Square Dance Jubilee, and Everybody's Dancin!.” As a result...
“His career ballooned, much like his ego.”
That’s from Wide Open Country and it tees up Spade Cooley’s dark side. He was a reckless womanizer – in an unpublished manuscript, Bennett recorded arranging 10 abortions for his client in a single year – but he also jealously guarded his reputation, as well as his self-esteem. When Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (profiled here) rolled into “the Nashville of the West Coast,” Cooley’s outfit felt the heat of competition for time at venues. The competition came to a head when one of them bumped Cooley’s band for Bob Wills’. Cooley immediately demanded a “battle of the bands” and he acted up throughout – i.e., “During the performance, Cooley insulted Wills multiple times, often playing Wills' signature songs.” Whether he won, or just declared himself the winner, Cooley staked his claim to the title “King of Western Swing” - and with some justification (Cooley’s management had promoted him under the title since 1942). Musicianguide.com quoted another source to speak to the justice of the decision:
“According to Kurt Wolff in Country Music: The Rough Guide: "The Hollywood socialite and his orchestra were nowhere near as rowdy and loose around the edges as the great Texas swing bands of the 1930s; Cooley perfected a smoother, cooler, and in many ways slicker sound that was far more orchestrated than the music of [Bob] Wills or [Milton] Brown. The electric guitar, for instance, had a rounder sound, the strings were denser and arranged in a 'section' compared to the bright twin-fiddle sound of [Wills's] Texas Playboys.”
Cooley’s recording career take off around the same time. His scored his first hit single in 1944 with “Shame on You” (released on Okeh) and followed it up with six more Top 10 hits, including “Detour,” “Crazy ‘Cause I Love You,” and “Forgive Me One More Time,” (ooof, the foreshadowing keeps getting darker). At some point in all of this, a singer named Ella Mae Evans caught Cooley’s ever-wandering eye. He pulled some strings to get her into his orchestra and, over time, made her both a featured singer and his wife (he left “Ann” for her, in other words).
The mid-1940s got a little rocky for Cooley – e.g., he lost his lead vocalist, Tex Willaims (famous for this (great) song; but also a vocal component Cooley borrowed from Wills), along with most of the rest of his band, and he had to endure a second musicians strike – but he landed on both feet in 1947 with his starring role on the Hoffman Hayride television series. The show did quite well: apart from beating the nationally broadcast Milton Berle Show in the LA market, it won a couple local Emmys (1952 to 1953) and had the clout to call in guests like Frankie Laine, Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore. That kept Cooley going for a while, but the network canceled Cooley’s show in 1956 and replaced it with another act, one all but certain to stir up the ghost of Bob Wills (Cliffie Stone's Hometown Jamboree). After one last absurd stab at doing something big – the man attempted to build a waterpark in the Mojave, for Christ’s sake – Cooley grew frustrated about the end of all that. He hit the bottle as well, and when he got drunk and frustrated, he unleashed his demons on Ella Mae.
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| Better than he deserved... |
Despite years of his own infidelities, Cooley grew enraged when he heard that Ella Mae once cheated on him with Roy Rogers. After multiple incidents of violence – one of them ending with her begging not to be released from the hospital he sent her to out of fear for her life – Ella Mae asked for a separation. As these things often sadly go, the unhappy couple took a couple stabs at mending the break, with Cooley doing the begging – and that ended as far too many of these things do. Only worse. The details vary, but they all the agree that Cooley brutalized his wife for hours on her final day and made his 14-year-old daughter, Melody, watch some of the worst of it (“...she was forced by her father to watch in terror as he beat her mother's head against the floor, stomped on her stomach, then crushed a lit cigarette against her skin to see whether she was dead”). It was Meldoy’s testimony that put him away, but that does nothing to erase the horror of that.
Cooley was convicted of murder in the first-degree (correctly) and sentenced to life in prison (also correct) in 1961, only with the possibility of parole after seven years (what?). His “Hollywood friends” started pushing for his parole as soon as they could; some even reached out to then-California governor, Ronald Reagan – i.e., the same man then making a national name as a tough-on-crime candidate with a succession of calls to grant police the freedom to beat bloody anyone with the audacity to protest the Vietnam War or to tune in, turn on, etc. in San Francisco. (Law and order always looks the same for that bunch...)
The California State Audit Authority granted Cooley parole and he scheduled his release on February 22, 1970. That he’d developed a heart condition in the pen might have had something to do with that, but, with his release just three months away, Cooley was granted a three-day furlough to play a charity concert for the Deputy Sheriff’s Association of Alameda County at the Oakland Auditorium on November 23, 1969. Cooley collapsed from a heart attack during an intermission back-stage. He received a standing ovation. From an association of deputy sheriffs. Ahem.
About the Sampler
I went with 16 songs for the sampler and, given all the above, it’s kind of hard to listen to it now. If there’s a first hill to abandon in the whole “art-versus-the-artist” debate, the hill Spade Cooley stands on feels like a great place to start, because fuck that guy.
He left behind some good music, obviously – he wouldn’t have been so damn popular otherwise – so, to give that it’s due, here’s the rest of the sampler that I haven’t already linked to above:
“Swinging the Devil’s Dream” and “Hollywood Hoedown” make a good introduction to his fiddling energy, while tunes like “Oklahoma Stomp” and his spin on the standard “Steel Guitar Rag” front the guitar sound. “Spadella” is another interesting piece (also, the name of a collection that gave Cooley a mini-revival in the true-crime-loving 1990s), a little more complex in composition than most of his material, even if it’s more on-brand then the almost pure swing of “Perdido.” There’s also the proto-rock “Three Way Boogie.” Still, most of what I head from files under some variety of mid-century country – i.e., cleaner and more polished than what came before while still showing plenty of the roots. Those include, “I’ve Taken All I’m Gonna Take,” “A Pair of Broken Hearts,” “You Can’t Break My Heart,” “You Better Do It Now,” “It’s Dark Outside,” and “The Trouble With Me,” which, again, like a lot of his songs, has a haunting quality once you know how his story ends.
Cooley was convicted of murder in the first-degree (correctly) and sentenced to life in prison (also correct) in 1961, only with the possibility of parole after seven years (what?). His “Hollywood friends” started pushing for his parole as soon as they could; some even reached out to then-California governor, Ronald Reagan – i.e., the same man then making a national name as a tough-on-crime candidate with a succession of calls to grant police the freedom to beat bloody anyone with the audacity to protest the Vietnam War or to tune in, turn on, etc. in San Francisco. (Law and order always looks the same for that bunch...)
The California State Audit Authority granted Cooley parole and he scheduled his release on February 22, 1970. That he’d developed a heart condition in the pen might have had something to do with that, but, with his release just three months away, Cooley was granted a three-day furlough to play a charity concert for the Deputy Sheriff’s Association of Alameda County at the Oakland Auditorium on November 23, 1969. Cooley collapsed from a heart attack during an intermission back-stage. He received a standing ovation. From an association of deputy sheriffs. Ahem.
About the Sampler
I went with 16 songs for the sampler and, given all the above, it’s kind of hard to listen to it now. If there’s a first hill to abandon in the whole “art-versus-the-artist” debate, the hill Spade Cooley stands on feels like a great place to start, because fuck that guy.
He left behind some good music, obviously – he wouldn’t have been so damn popular otherwise – so, to give that it’s due, here’s the rest of the sampler that I haven’t already linked to above:
“Swinging the Devil’s Dream” and “Hollywood Hoedown” make a good introduction to his fiddling energy, while tunes like “Oklahoma Stomp” and his spin on the standard “Steel Guitar Rag” front the guitar sound. “Spadella” is another interesting piece (also, the name of a collection that gave Cooley a mini-revival in the true-crime-loving 1990s), a little more complex in composition than most of his material, even if it’s more on-brand then the almost pure swing of “Perdido.” There’s also the proto-rock “Three Way Boogie.” Still, most of what I head from files under some variety of mid-century country – i.e., cleaner and more polished than what came before while still showing plenty of the roots. Those include, “I’ve Taken All I’m Gonna Take,” “A Pair of Broken Hearts,” “You Can’t Break My Heart,” “You Better Do It Now,” “It’s Dark Outside,” and “The Trouble With Me,” which, again, like a lot of his songs, has a haunting quality once you know how his story ends.
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