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...

One Hit No More, No. 85: Debby Boone Lights Up Everyone's Life

Snapshot from the origin story.

The Hit
I knew the chorus, of course, if from nothing more than hamming through it with my sisters back in late 1970s Ohio. The flash of recognition that hit when I heard the opening piano part for the first time in…shit, has three and a half decades, and then rolling right into, “so many nights, I’d sit by my window,” that surprised me.

It shouldn’t have. Like any sentient person who lived through the late 70s, I heard Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” scores, if not hundreds, of times. It haunted us all. Still, there’s a lot I didn’t know about it - starting with how goddamn massive it was. A 2017 interview in Goldmine Mag says that it remains the Warner Brothers label’s all-time biggest-selling single, but Wikipedia provides a fuller list of honors: when it dropped in 1977, it broke Billboard’s record for the longest stay at No. 1 when it stuck there for 10 weeks; after they did the math, Billboard ranked it at No. 7 all-time in the 50-year history of their Hot 100; it earned Boone a Grammy as Best New Artist of 1977 and an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Single for the same year; the guy who wrote it, Joe Brooks (more on him shortly), snagged Song of the Year awards from both the Grammys and the Oscars in 1978. And that’s the first pivot in the story.

Brooks wrote “You Light Up My Life” for a movie of the same name. Wikipedia’s muddles the timeline, but the movie/song came before Boone recorded it - a detail clarified in a 2019 interview/plug with Boone in a Virginia-based outlet called the Daily Presss. The female lead in You Light Up My Life, Didi Conn (Frenchie from the movie Grease, btw), lip-synched the song while another woman, Kacey Cisyk, sang the vocals. While the movie didn’t do so hot (may have bombed, factually), the song had legs to the point where the people involved could tell they had a hit on their hands. What happened next comes from two angles:

“It became clear the song would be a hit, but Brooks had a falling-out with Cisyk and her husband. He contracted Boone to re-record the vocals over the original recording, standing with her in the studio and demanding that every note Boone sang, every inflection, was an exact match to Cisyk’s original from the movie.”

Now, from Boone's perspective:

MAME Playlist, May 2019, Week 3: Naming Conventions and Unlikely(?) Careers

Today's theme: unlikely rock.

I had one of those weeks when I up and decided I hadn’t heard no frills, half-conscious “rock” for too long. Then I recalled a band who claimed they were about nothing else. So I went back to reconnect with the band that brought me “Day Stealer.”

Welcome to the third playlist of May 2019.

Music Band

This Nashville trio was one of the first bands Spotify’s Discover Weekly fed me in the 2nd half of 2016. Note the date…

The experience of trying to research this band underlines the importance choosing a good, searchable name. Over half an hour of trying combinations of “music,” “band,” and “Nashville” pulled up scores of Nashville-based bands (and means of booking them), but none of them this Music Band. When I wrote about them for the predecessor site to this one (don’t bother looking; it’s deleted), I could find reviews – both of albums and live performances – and a couple interviews. Their 2016 album, Wake Up Laughing, was probably a year old by then and Music Band had probably done some touring to support it. Anyway, between their name and the passing of three years, I can’t even dig up the names of the dudes in the band…

…they do have a (modest) twitter account and it appears they’re still active, even talking about another album.

If that doesn’t come out, Music Band will have put out just two albums: Wake Up Laughing and 2014’s (EP?), Can I Live. They won’t blow your mind or anything - one review for Wake Up Laughing offers qualified praise (“vocals that aren’t particularly distinctive and compressed production that doesn’t do these songs justice”), while another one just shits all over it/them (“Music Band? Really? It’s like they’re putting so much effort into putting in absolutely no effort.”) – but the song “Green Lights” left a fond enough memory of them that I circled back. And, no, they aren’t original, they aren’t brave, lyrically or musically. They also make no claims to be. As for what they sound like, eh, this gets close enough: