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Critic's Review
Steve Leggett, All Music Guide
If Donnell Clyde "Spade" Cooley didn't exactly invent Western swing (credit for that goes to pioneers like the Light Crust Doughboys and Milton Brown), then he was at least the man who gave the genre its name and its first hugely commercial hits. An able fiddler, Cooley rose from rags to riches by combining country rhythms and big-band jazz with a crowd-pleasing style that made him a multi-millionaire. Hardly a purist, Cooley's sides had a slick, commercial gloss that often obscured the inspired playing by legendary sidemen such as Joaquin Murphy, Noel Boggs, and Smokey Rogers. His biggest hits, like "Shame on You" and "You Can't Break My Heart," both included here in radio transcriptions, featured the honey-tinged voice of Tex Williams. The poster boy for a cautionary tale, Cooley's heavy drinking and inner demons boiled over in 1961 when he murdered his wife, Ella Mae Evans, a former vocalist with his band, and was sent to prison. He died in 1969 on the brink of parole. While the instrumentals included in this collection are sleek and impressive (several are Cooley's versions of tunes made famous by Bob Wills), the most memorable tracks feature Tex Williams on vocals.
