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The clean on the beat lyrics were origiated or made popular by Guy Lombardo. Get his records. Every word of the vocals is clear and precise and on the beat.

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No wonder he was so popular with the thousands of folks who came to see his band.
If the great players in his band ran the band, things would be hip, you couldn't find the beat to dance to it and they wouldn't care anything about a singer messing things up with lyrics and nobody would show up to see them in any appreciable numbers to get a good paying gig.

I got the impression from the book that the band was quite something live, but I have to agree with this thread. The couple CDs I bought in search of Joaquin solos let me down. It's really like listening to the Lawrence Welk of western swing.

Edited to mention that putting a harp in the band was just a lame thing to do.

[This message was edited by Scott Houston on 09 June 2004 at 07:06 PM.]

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It's really like listening to the Lawrence Welk of western swing.

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PRECISELY,but I'll take "S.C." over "L.W.", any day of the week!!

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  ©¿©  It don't mean a thang,   
  mm   if it ain't got that twang.
       www.ntsga.com

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Livin' in the Past and the Future with a 12 string Mooney Universal tuning.

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Seems to me there is a story out there about Spades band blowing away Bob Wills band one night out in Calif. Anybody hear that one?

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At Venice Pier, success had tilted the Phillips-Cooley relationship into unfriendly territory. Phillips hired Bob Wills to replace Cooley at the ballroom. Cocky and defiant, Cooley insisted on a one-weekend "Battle of the Band" with Wills before leaving. After two nights of alternating sets, the audience gave the nod to Cooley, whereupon Spade crowned himself the "King of Western Swing." The title stuck, as did the phrase, "western swing," now the standard nom de plume for that particular genre of music.

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I got the impression from the book that the band was quite something live, but I have to agree with this thread. The couple CDs I bought in search of Joaquin solos let me down. It's really like listening to the Lawrence Welk of western swing.

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There may be a variety of reasons for this, at least as far as the difference between the quality of live/studio performances goes. Mostly wartime shellac rationing & the Petrillo Ban (AFM strike) would've prevented recordings being made during WWII, which seems to have been when Spade's band was at the height of its success and popularity, and perhaps the zenith of its hottest live performances, too. (More "seasoned" contributors to this thread, feel free to correct me on this one if I'm wrong!) Changing popular tastes may have also influenced Spade's selection of material. According to the "Spadella" liner-notes, by the end of the 1940s, the 20-year heyday of the cowboy movie was mostly over, along with the public's fascination with both singing cowboys and highly arranged western swing bands. Cooley reacted to all of this by using more horns in the band, and by "retooling his 18-piece band into a slick, Freddy Martin-like entity." ie- making the band's music more "accessible." Evidently all throughout his career, Spade was playing catch-up with folks like Bob Wills' band, Roy Rogers & Lawrence Welk. Constant stress in Spade's personal life wouldn't have helped either, and may have distracted him, as Jim humorously alludes to above.

To me, Cooley had some great bands, but you get to hear a lot more raw stuff by Bob Wills due to all those transcription discs he cut, and there's some hot stuff on those.

Cooley did not seem to dig the blues at all, to my ears the cat had no affinity for it at all.

Another totally commercial West Coast outfit was Ole Rasmussen's band, they cut excellent short swinging melodic numbers that were an extremely commercial take on the Wills sound.
Despite a fairly hamfisted piano player, the band generally managed to avoid the overly sentimental vibe of Welk and Cooley by still employing fiddlers as opposed to four violinists and a horn section.

Tex Williams and the Western Caravan have some truly awesome live transcription recordings, hot stuff indeed.

I played with the LW orchestra on several occasions. There were some musicians in that band that were just virtuoso calibre. Henry Cuestra on clarinet just scared the dickens out of me when he launched on Sing,Sing,Sing. Myron Floren on accordion. Jo Anne Castle on piano. That vibes player that would dance and jump over the vibes, incredible. The Dixieland group was great as well as the rhythm section. When they put the book down in front of me and starting calling chart numbers out and counting off tempos I knew I was in the middle of something very good and very challenging!! I was covering Buddy Merrill AND Neal Lavangs' chair.

I don't really see how you can dis any group of musicians (Cooley or Welk) 30 or 40 years after the fact that they were the top rated musical acts regionally and nationally. Great is great no matter how the musical tastes change.

I like beautiful melodies played by good musicians with precision. It doesn't all have to be raw roots music for me. Spade's bands fit all the qualifications.

Spade changed his style beginning in 1946 with the mutiny of Tex Williams, Smokey Rogers, and Deuce Spriggens. They left, along with Cactus Soldi, to form the Western Caravan. Joaquin had left earlier to play with the Plainsmen, and Pedro was in the army. When Pedro got out, he joined the Caravan, and Joaquin joined in (I think) early 1947.

BTW, the pre-1946 band really didn't have a full "string section." It was Spade, Tiny Hunt, and Cactus generally. But they were trained violinists as well as jazz musicians (at least Cactus was), and since Spade and Pedro (also a violinist) probably wanted it "legit," that's how they played it.

When the Tex contingent split, Spade started making the change to the horn band, and that probably came to it's zenith in the early 1950's. That's when I remember Spade's TV show, which sounded like Harry James Orchestra played by musicians in cowboy suits.

Which was okay for me, I like big band as well.

Lawrence Welk, I dig him too, but not for the same reasons I like Ellington and Basie. Square? Sure, but he was playing for his audiences, which were square... not the hipsters the "real" jazzers were playing for. The musicians in his group were amazing. I was at a session with Neil Levang years ago, and he was playing fiddle tunes on the guitar while eating a sandwich and sight reading his part. And Paul Humphreys was one of the amazing drummers in jazz. They took the gig because it was steady and paid well. Who wouldn't, huh?

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Herb's Steel Guitar Pages
Texas Steel Guitar Association

[This message was edited by Herb Steiner on 10 June 2004 at 11:51 AM.]

I had a friend here,in Nashville,that played harp for Cooley.("Fidoodlin' " on Raynote Records) He was the late Lloyd Lindroth. In his office,hanging in a frame,was a copy of his contract he had signed w/ Spade. His weekly wage,then,was $75.00. (more like "weAkly",but then,you have to consider the time era.)

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  ©¿©  It don't mean a thang,   
  mm   if it ain't got that twang.
       www.ntsga.com

The Spade sound was quite unique and set the standard for the west coast western swing sound. I dig the hot accordion and the harp, which is used sparingly, sounds fine to me. Johnny Gimble makes a distinction between Western Swing and what he prefers to call Texas Swing, which features more blowing and fewer arranged parts.

As for the songs, well, some are good and plenty ain't. Fred Roses and Cindy Walkers are hard to find and cultivate. I have a Hank Penny CD that has some very hot playing on an array of awful songs. One of Bob Wills' great strength was his ability to find good songs. Apparently that's true for any recording artist who can stand the test of time.

So Bob's band typically used two fiddles in harmony while Spade's featured two fiddles in unison with a third doing a harmony?

Did Bob's arrangements deliberately avoid unison fiddles?

Another observation:
Listening to Spade Cooley stuff I seem to notice more of an emphasis on the use of vibrato in the fiddle sections than on Bob's records, where the fiddles just saw away without much concern for vibrato. Do you, as a fiddler, get this same impression? It's as if Cooley & his guys were thinking as "voilinists", while Bob preferred to be "fiddlin'". I'd be interested to hear your take on this.

-GV

[This message was edited by Greg Vincent on 11 June 2004 at 01:39 PM.]

Joe Holley was a lefty and he played a regular fiddle backwards without restringing it so his bow moved opposite from a righty - the lower string G was on the inside and the E on the outside. This makes his licks hard to cop and his playing is unique, inventive and instantly recognizable. Check out his solo on Bubbles In My Beer. I got to hang out with him in Fresno back around '76 and '77. An excellent guy with great stories to tell.

Say CC, maybe the guitar player you're trying to remember was Johnny Weis. He played with Spade and Tex and was mighty hot.

One more thought on the Spade sound and it’s influence – Spade was a tough task master and parsimonious with the dough (cheap). When Capitol records offered Tex Williams his own contract Spade fired him. Most of the band mutinied and went with Tex. This became the Western Caravan and I highly recommend listening to their stuff. There’s an excellent compilation CD out on Vintage. Steel players include Joaquin Murphy; Eddie Mitchell, and Pete Martinez. The fiddlers were Rex Call, Harry Sims, and Cactus Soldi. Great guitars from Benny Garcia, Johnny Weis, Jimmy Bryant and others. These arrangements are much hipper than Spade’s and veer into bop phrases. I think you’ll like ‘em. There’s few live tracks on the end from the early 60’s that feature a band that includes Glen Campbell on guitar and a very young Denny Mathis on steel.