Crash Course Timeline, No. 50: Hank Penny, the Itinerant Understudy of 1940s Western Swing

Handsome devil...

I needed a palette cleanser after that last one. To start by setting the scene...

“While he never achieved the kind of success enjoyed by fellow bandleaders like Bob Wills or Spade Cooley, during the late '40s and early '50s Hank Penny ranked as one of the foremost practitioners of the Western swing sound.”

Herbert Clayton Penny was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the autumn of 1918. His father, a disabled coalminer who moonlighted in a few creative arts (e.g., he played guitar, did magic and wrote poetry), inspired young Herbert to follow in his footsteps – and he didn’t wait long. He found paying work on local radio by his mid-teens and spent most of the rest of his life bouncing around for work in entertainment.

New Orleans was his first destination. Penny arrived in 1936, just in time to hear the first stirring of the Western swing sound, then put out by Bob Wills (profiled here) and his one-time bandleader/one-time collaborator, Milton Brown. He met one of his own steady future musical companions, the “steel virtuoso” Noel Boggs, but Penny did more radio work as a solo performer at New Orleans’ WWL. That period didn’t last long, though; he was back in Birmingham by 1938.

Once back home, Penny formed the first of many bands of his career. He called them the Radio Cowboys and handled banjo playing duties; the rest of the line-up included Julian Akins (guitar), Sammy Forsmark (steel guitar), Louis Dumont (tenor banjo), Carl Stewart (bass), and a guitarists/fiddler named Sheldon Bennett led on vocals...and I will only mention one more of Hank Penny’s band’s lineups because there are a lot of them (and, for the curious, allmusic.com is the best source). The Radio Cowboys got big enough locally to record a couple sides, their first being “When I Take My Sugar to Tea” and one of Penny’s own compositions, “Flamin’ Mamie.”

Penny spent the next several years bouncing between cities and bands, some of them major destinations in country music history – e.g., Nashville and Chicago (home to National Barn Dance) – and he was personally fairly in demand, turning down offers to lead established radio acts like the Light Crust Doughboys (where Wills started). After reuniting with Boggs in Atlanta (on another radio show), Penny moved on to Cincinnati’s WLW radio station where he formed his next band, The Plantation Boys, which, apart from Carl Stewart, had a completely different line-up (and Stewart switched to fiddle). Before long, though, he felt the pull of the unlikely city that had become the Western swing mecca of the United States, Los Angeles, California.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 49: An Absolute Bastard Named Spade Cooley

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...