Customer Reviews

Shame On You

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If you have been disappointed by other Spade Cooley Recordings, you may have snagged some of his later recordings. Cooley wasn't much of a musician himself and was always tending toward the middle of the road. After WWII he got into firing all of his musicians and replacing them, moving the band successively closer to easy listening music. By the late 1950s Cooley was considered in the same bag as Lawrence Welch.

However, this is one of the hottest western swing aggragations ever put together. You can always tell that if Tex Williams is on the record, because the first big firing had almost all of these guys and gals going into Williams' great first band.

This band was put together specifically to wage big battles of the bands on the Santa Monica and Venice Piers during WWII. They were hired to out play and out improvise and get people dancing longer than any of the other bands. They regularly did battle with Bob Wills' Texas Playboys before thousands and thousands of war workers many of whom had come from Texas Oklahoma and other areas where Western Swing had grown up. During the war years and shortly after both Cooley and Wills were among the most popular performers of any kind in California and the entir ecountry.

If you are really into the music, you will welcome that there are a number of cuts performed by Cooley on his standard releases (get the Spadella collection if you want the same stuff done in the studio). You can listen to the alternate solos and improvs by different band members.

The sound quality here is outstanding for remastered air checks. This is a definite buy. Most people I know who heard Wills and Cooley back in the 1940s tell me that air checks like these and the Tiffany Transcriptions of Wills are the closest thing to the way they actually sounded in live performance.

This album is an excellent collection of radio transcripts from 1944 and early 1945 that are previously unreleased. Spade Cooley's band played a superb brand of Western Swing(California style). The instrumentals are performed with verve and gusto. The Vocals, by Tex Williams, are smooth and exude an earnest sincerity. Bloodshot Records should be commended for releasing this CD.

I originally bought the CD because of the song "South". The beat to the song just knocked me outta my socks. I heard the rest of the tunes and it just rocked. This is Spade Cooley when he played at the Santa Monica ballroom for all those years. And it is just something when that kinda playin' atmosphere is recorded. Good CD. The two songs "Topeka Polka" and "I Found A New Baby" rule.

In my eclectic bag of music tastes, I must include classic country swing. Owning albums by Sons of the New Pioneers and others, I was not familiar with Spade Cooley until I previewed this release. One listen, and I downloaded the entire album. So glad I did. The arrangements are really snappy. I'd call this genre R & K. That's right: Rhythm and Kitsch, or as my son commented "Music to marry your cousin by"

Either way, it'll make you laugh, then get up and dance!