Spade Cooley

Violinist and cellist, singer, actor, composer and songwriter ("Shame On You"), conductor, arranger and inventor who popularized western swing music on film and recordings, in person and on radio and television. When Spade was four, he and his parents John and Emma Cooley moved to Oregon where he studied classical violin and cello, and at the age of eight he began performing at community dances and hoedowns with his father. At age 22, his parents moved to Modesto, California where he earned a modest living playing in bars and outdoor events as well as in nearby Fresno and Stockton for polka parties and square dances. A persistent search for film work landed him a job at Republic Pictures as a stand-in for Roy Rogers with whom he shared a slight resemblance. Soon he was singing with the Riders of the Purple Sage and made his first recording in 1941 with the Cal Shrum. The Spade Cooley Orchestra was formed soon afterward as a headline attraction at the Venice Pier Ballroom and later at the Riverside Rancho in Los Angeles (where the popular Carolina Cotton joined the band as a bass fiddler, singer and yodeler), and the band opened the doors at the new Santa Monica Ballroom while recording for RCA Victor. His eleven-year television career started at KTLA on August 5, 1948 where he broadcast live from the Santa Monica Ballroom, capturing seventy-five percent of the viewership. The orchestra dissolved in 1959 and Cooley began planning a never-built amusement park for Kern County to be called Water Wonderland which would feature boat races and swimming and incorporate a broadcast studio for a new television series. But health and financial problems ensued while at the same time his popularity was quickly fading. Spade Cooley was always a driven man and a classic Type A personality; but alcohol became an issue as did marital discord and personal anger, and several heart attacks weakened him. According to reports, Spade was increasingly frustrated over the growing distance in his marriage and he exploded in shock, horror and violence at the moment his wife told him she had secretly been a part of a sex-love cult. (This may have been a partial or total fiction she created to get Spade to divorce her.) At that moment he lashed out blindly at her, rupturing her aorta which caused her death. Cooley, now frail and in a wheelchair throughout the first-degree murder trial, never forgave himself and refused a sanity hearing, but the judge imposed a life sentence at the California State Prison Medical Facility at Vacaville where Cooley, a model prisoner, founded a music program with a band and then an orchestra which gave concerts. He learned to play guitar and developed an electric violin. In August 1969 Spade Cooley won a unanimous vote for parole to take effect the following February, and he was granted a three-day work furlough for his Vacaville orchestra to do an Alameda County Deputy Sheriff's Association concert at the Oakland Auditorium. Greeted with thunderous applause as in the old days, the officials and guests cheered Cooley throughout and, at the concert's conclusion, three thousand law-enforcement officers roared a thunderous standing ovation as Spade took bow after bow while friends, fans, prison guards and even relatives crowded the stage. Spade Cooley, out of breath, sat down in a chair, and then fell forward onto the floor, already dead. His body was returned to the prison and was cremated. From that point, no one knows for certain what became of the remains of Spade Cooley.