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...

Crash Course Timeline, No. 48: Jimmie Davis, Sunshine...and Some Unsavory Stuff

"The Singing Governor" they called him. He lived up to it.

Another chapter about a country musician turned politician. The origin story’s rougher in this one – as are the politics.

James “Jimmie” Houston Davis was born somewhere around 1899 (his actual date of birth was unknown) and raised dirt-poor with 10 siblings in Beech Springs, Louisiana, in Jackson Parish. In later interviews – and, given his career, he may have embellished a little – Davis recalled not having an actual bed until he turned nine and receiving a dried hog bladder and a "plucked blackbird" as the first gifts he received (he and his siblings used the bladder as a ball and they ate the blackbird). He figured out early that he’d need an education if he didn’t want to end his days as a sharecropper.

After graduating high school and wrapping up at New Orleans’ Soule Business College, Davis worked toward a bachelor’s degree in history at Louisiana College in Pineville. While there, he became a staple in a slew of music clubs – e.g., glee clubs and quartets with macho names like Wildcat Four and Tiger Four (he sang tenor) – and did a little more singing in the evenings, including on street corners, to help pay his way through. Despite the occasional setback (e.g., he had to drop out a term), Davis graduated and moved on to graduate school in Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he mastered in education...and wrote a master’s thesis on the “differences in intelligence between the races” titled Comparative Intelligence of Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes. This foreshadows part of the man in whole...

Jimmie Davis lasted only the 1928-29 academic year as a teacher at Dodd’s College for Girls, before taking a job as a clerk at the Shreveport Criminal Court, a job he held for nearly a decade. His music career actually started as moonlighting: he sang at Shreveport’s radio station, KWKH, for $5/week and was recording sides for Victor Talking Machine Company as early as 1928. About that:

“The roughly 60 sides Davis recorded for Victor between 1928 and 1934 were, in the words of country music historian John Morthland, as quoted in London, England's Daily Telegraph, ‘the dirtiest batch of songs any one person had ever recorded in country music.’”

The titles included “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” “Red Nightgown Blues,” and “Organ Grinder’s Blues” – the latter being a nod to “a popular anti-impotence monkey-gland treatment popularized by quack physician and heavy radio advertiser John R. Brinkley.” As an aside that shows the complexity of his time and place, Davis recorded a number of his earlier sides with a black blues musician named Oscar “Buddy” Woods. He would later move on from the down-‘n’-dirty blues, but, while he would downplay them, he never disavowed the recordings. When Davis started his political career in earnest, his opponents tried to offend voters by playing Davis’ early recordings over a loudspeaker; they started dancing instead.

One Hit No More, No. 115: Tom Tom Club, a Club Without David Byrne

Think this gets to it best.

Was it all just a plot to escape the soul-sucking gravity of David Byrne? I kid. I kid.

The Hit
“We only said no one time that I can think of right now. It was one of those over-the-top gangster lyrics. We wouldn’t dream of censoring anyone’s lyrics but we reserve the right to deny permission to use our music if we think its garbage.”
- jambands.com interview with Chris Frantz (2001? Really?)

Because the making of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” is no different from everything else they did, I figured I’d fill this section with its multiple second lives as a popular simple. The first act to repurpose it was Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde for “Genius Rap,” but “It’s Nasty” by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five couldn’t have been too far behind. The (very likely incomplete) of artists who have borrowed it, for better or worse, continues from there – e.g., Tupac Shakur, Puff Daddy, Coolio, Busta Rhymes, L’Trimm, Funkdoobiest, Busta Rhymes, Mariah Carey, etc. etc.

I honestly can’t recall the first time I heard it, but I’m confident I had no clue who performed it; honestly, the first time I gave it any thought was when I heard Mariah Carey's "Fantasy" and thought, "hold it, I know that sample." And had someone said “Tom Tom Club,” I’m almost certain I would either said, “who?” or assumed it was some mid-‘80s synth act I ignored...so I fucked up.

What’s not to love about a song that melds bubbly and twitchy so seamlessly? Obviously, that means I actually listened the lyrics for the first time for the first time this week and; 1) I never caught all the name-drops and 2) it’s unclear whether or not Frantz was the “laughing boyfriend” referenced in the song, but he claimed it in at least one interview.

The Rest of the Story
“[Q:] Those early Tom Tom Club singles were pretty groundbreaking in mixing up disco, funk, reggae and rap with post-punk art-school attitude. Was that a conscious strategy?”

“[Tina Weymouth]: It was sort of organically grown that way. We wanted to make a dance record, we didn't want to sound like our other band and compete with that. We wanted to make something more escapist. And I think we succeeded rather well, actually.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 47: Bob Atcher, Country Singer, Architect of Schaumburg

Giving Bonnie credit 'cause they don't.

James Robert Owen “Bob” Atcher was born into a musical family in Hardin County, Kentucky. He learned to play violin from his champion fiddle-playing father and picked up guitar as well. Something else he learned – and this was either from his father or his grandfather (turns out you can only read the Chicago Tribune’s fond tribute once without a subscription) – was an appreciation for commerce and good business sense. Shockingly, the same person who said that encouraged Bob Atcher in his dream to become a professional musician (though this came after some time working on a family ranch in North Dakota).

Atcher made good on the bet, steadily climbing from regional radio platforms (Louisville’s WHAS) to the big, clear-channel national broadcasts that reached half the country. His first truly national platform - a regular radio gig on Chicago’s WBBM starting in 1939 – made him a national star. Mixing old country and folk with “novelty songs,” he scored a string of hits, some as a soloist (e.g., “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” and a cover of Ernest Tubbs’ “Walking the Floor Over You,” which I can't find) and several as half of a duet with Loeta Applegate, who performed under the stage-name “Bonnie Blue Eyes.” In fact, their cover of Jimmie Davis’ “You Are My Sunshine” (and the later, “Answer to You Are My Sunshine”) and “Pins and Needles (in My Heart)” were the first things I found; sadly, Applegate doesn’t exist so far as the Internet’s concerned. “Pins and Needles” was the last song Atcher and Applegate recorded before he shipped off for World War, and it stayed in the charts for much of 1943 and became a standard for the war years.

Fans didn’t forget Atcher. He recorded a couple hits after coming back from the war – “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me” and “I Must Have Been Wrong” – and graduated from a Columbia imprint (the venerable Okeh label) to Columbia’s main label. In 1948, he released one of that label’s earliest long play (LP) records with Early American Folk Songs; the same year saw Atcher sign on as a regular performer for the National Barn Dance on Chicago’s WLS station, aka, the then-big time for country music. He remained a fixture on the show “well into the 1960s” and, after bouncing between Capitol Records and Kapp Records in the 1950s, he returned to Columbia, where he re-recorded many of his old hits in stereo (I included his re-recorded “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” on the sampler to show what that did to his sound).

Something else Atcher did: invest wisely and well. Perhaps more impressively, he went on to turn his business smarts to public service as the mayor of Schaumburg, Illinois from 1959-1975. Atcher moved there in order to be close, but not too close to WLS. To give a sense of the city he moved to, here’s a quote from a 1900 brochure advertising the village:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 46: The Ink Spots & the Ravens, aka, the Bridge to Doo Wop

The, um, important line-up.

This chapter aims to reveal the two-step bridge between the Mills Brothers (covered in his chapter) and the doo wop groups of the late 1950s/early 1960s by way of a quick study of two of the most successful groups to carry it forward. I’ve already picked at this in one of the earliest chapters in the One Hit No More series (the chapter on Don & Juan), but this post will go a little deeper. One group came before the other and influenced themr as well. Finally, as if ordained by fate, each band led from the opposite end of the pitch spectrum. To borrow a frame from Marv Goldberg’s exhaustive history of the later band (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3):

“To Bart, the Ravens must have seemed like the anti-Ink Spots. Instead of having a lead singer with an impossibly high voice, the Ravens had a lead singer with an impossibly low one.”

And I’ll get to who “Bart” is eventually. But first...

The Ink Spots
The Ink Spots came up in the Indianapolis, Indiana area in the early 1930s. The two original members, Jerry Daniels and Charlie Fuqua, started performing as a duo called “Jerry and Charlie,” but they soon folded in two more members from a quartet called “The Four Riff Brothers,” Orville Jones and Deek Watson – or at least that’s Wikipedia’s quick summary. A short history in posted for their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction (you have to hit the pdf to see it) has all four members bouncing indiscriminately singing under a succession of names – e.g., the Peanut Boys, the Percolating Puppies, the Swinging Gate Brothers, King, Jack and the Jesters (Wikipedia has that as King, Jack and Jester with only Daniels, Fuqua and Watson present and as a singing/comedy act). Regardless of the name they performed under, they took inspiration from the “big-name jazz bands and old-time vaudeville acts and, with an assist from regular air-play on Cincinnati’s WLW radio station, they built a large enough regional following that they started probing the New York City market by the mid-1940s.

They landed a night at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater in the summer of 1934. They’d already changed their name to the Ink Spots by then thanks to legal notice from attorneys connected to the very famous Paul Whiteman Orchestra (covered in this chapter) had a singing group called “the King’s Jesters.” The Apollo show (with Tiny Bradshaw!) gave them enough juice to land them a tour of England, a path already opened by the Mills Brothers. (Just to note it, and because it’s a good story, the Ink Spots owed some amount of their success to the fact that the outbreak of World War II wound up stranding the Mills Brothers abroad for some a years.). After returning home (circa 1935), they recorded their first sides for Victor Records. Their first singles, “Swingin’ on the Strings” and “Your Feet’s Too Big” (which gives a feel for their comedy stylings), among them, failed to sell well. It took replacing Daniels for them to find full success and their sound.

One Hit No More, No. 114: Red Rider, CanRock Kings (+ Cars!)

Yes, seriously. Regular musicians.

The hardest ones to write about are the work-a-day musicians....

The Hit
When some source reminded me that MTV had Red Rider’s “Lunatic Fringe” on heavy rotation, my first thought was “yep.” A very young me mainlined their famous single and took in its half-paranoid lyrics and sound-scape as a glimpse into the world of adults and adult concerns. The eerie beginning sets the mood nicely, though I think it’s the way the strum-bursts of guitar play with the picked guitar foundation that most people recognize in game-show time. The main thing I remember is the contrast between the raw scrape and soaring notes in the slide guitar bridge/solo – which makes sense, seeing that I came to the song through the music video. I’m not sure I knew a guitar could do that at the time (10, I was 10).

Like a growing number of hit singles in this series, I describe the genre as “rock of a certain time and place” – Canadian, for one thing, and I’ll get to that – but, listening to it now...shit, 40 years later, and with the added context, I can’t get away from “sounds like Brian Adams.” And yet it doesn’t really.

MTV could only push it so far, but “Lunatic Fringe” did all right in the States, but mostly – and for that particular single – on what Billboard’s its “Rock Albums & Top Tracks” chart, where it hit No. 11. Red Rider hit Billboard’s regular-ol’ Hot 100 with three completely different songs, but if you meet someone who can name different single by Red Rider that isn’t “Lunatic Fringe,” congrats, you found yourself a rare animal. Or, just as likely, a Canadian. Tom Cochrane, the man who wrote the song, acknowledged its longevity and steady popularity in a 2017 conversation with The Wire Megazine (best source for color commentary, fwiw):

“It’s in the top 300 rocks songs of all time for airplay, so I’m very proud of ‘Lunatic Fringe.’ And, the subject matter is very contemporary when you look at what’s happening in the world today. So I’m very proud of that tune.”

He’s not kidding about its ongoing relevance, especially lyrically...even if I think he overrates half the equation:

“'Cause you've got to blame someone/
For your own confusion/
We're on guard this time (on guard this time)/
Against your final solution/
Oh no.”

Oh, and it’s big among the pro-wrestling and/or UFC scenes. Kurt Angle used it back when...

Crash Course Timeline, No. 45: The Andrews Sisters...For Fans of the Tabloids

The good times were good. Which makes the bad times worse.

“The following night, they sat in the Edison's soda fountain, hoisting a final toast to their failed dreams.”

“In her 1993 memoir Over Here, Over There, Maxene wrote about that night. As they sat in the soda fountain, in walked a man with pointed-toe shoes and a wide, snap-brim hat. In a gruff New York tone, he announced he was looking for the Andrews Sisters.”

“’Who's asking?’ they responded. ‘Jack Kapp from Decca Records,’ the man said. ‘He wants them to come audition.’”

“In unison, they declared, ‘We're the Andrews Sisters!’”
- MNopedia, short bio (2017)

The Andrews Sisters did plenty in unison – singing, dancing, acting, the classic triple-threat – but long, incredibly bitter feuds defined their lives off-stage, particularly after their parents died. The only performer who out-performed them through the 1940s was Bing Crosby (covered in an earlier chapter, because how could I avoid it?) – but he out-performed (literally) everybody – but Andrews Sisters helped him score several of his biggest hits, including “Pistol Packin’ Mama” and (I love this damn song) “Don’t Fence Me In.” (And that was the tip of the iceberg: Bing and the Andrews Sisters shared 47 recordings through the ‘40s, 23 of them hits.)

With Bing or without him, they recorded over 600 songs, moved 90 million units, and earned 15 gold records on the back of jukebox play and 46 Top 10 hits. The peak of their fame coincided with World War II to the extent that they went a long way to defining the pop culture of the war years – and it goes way beyond “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (that's a video-clip for a V-disc, btw) Their pop culture footprint both was and is, frankly, stunning (you’ll see). Their success only makes the way they started more surprising.

By birth-year and vocal range, the Andrews Sisters were, LaVerne Sophia (1911; contralto), Maxene Anglyn (1916, soprano) and Patricia “Patty” Marie (1918, mezzo-soprano); there was a second sister, between LaVerne and Maxene named Anglyn, but she died at eight months in 1916. Their mother, Olga “Ollie” Sollie, came from Norwegian stock, while their father, Peter Andreas, was Greek; the Norwegian side didn’t approve of the union, but they got over it after LaVerne’s birth. And, reading between the lines, they went with Andrews as a stage-name.