Night Tides and the Legacy of Spade Cooley

Kiki Gilderhus

Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys, Night Tides. HighTone Records, 2000.
Big Sandy, Dedicated to You. HighTone Records, 1998.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Spade Cooley was a western swing bandleader and the host of a popular television variety show in Los Angeles. Cooley was also a murderer. In April 1963, he beat his wife Ella Mae Evans to death in front of their fourteen-year-old daughter Melody. His crime fascinated me. I developed a little obsession with the tragic couple around the same time I started compiling a rough mix tape of songs about wife-killing, practically a song genre of its own: Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe," Guns 'n Roses' "I Used to Love Her But I Had to Kill Her," Neil Young's "Down By the River," or BR5-49's "Knoxville Girl" among others. The scenario differs only in the weapon: a man shoots or stabs or beats his woman to death for trifling around. Wife-killing in these songs is often casual and explicitly justified, the wife's infidelity (real or imagined) appropriately punishable by death. In Cooley's case the musician was the murderer, and long after he faded into obscurity, the horrific nature of the crime intertwines with the legacy of western swing.

Cooley haunts Night Tides, the latest effort by Big Sandy and the Fly Rite Boys (HighTone Records, 2000). Hailing from Anaheim, California, Big Sandy (né Robert Williams) draws from a number of influences--country, western swing, rockabilly, doo wop, R & B, and jump blues. The best Big Sandy songs are the sexy ones about seduction, innocent on the surface and a little dirty underneath. The retro appeal of the band is equivalent to a Model T or Vargas bombshell, yet the band isn't ironic or a mere copyist. This is most evident on Big Sandy's 1998 HighTone Release Dedicated to You, an album featuring the vocals of the 1950s LA doo wop quartet The Calvanes. As Big Sandy writes in the liner notes, the album represents his exploration of the vocal groups and R & B sounds in Los Angeles during the 1950s and early '60s. Big Sandy knows his history and the place his band holds in the spectrum of rock 'n roll.

Night Tides features lighthearted songs--"Give Your Loving to Me" or "Hey Lowdown"--but the album hinges on the image of Spade Cooley, alone in his jail cell and awake in the middle of the night. The first three songs might be understood as the back story to Ella Mae's killing, perhaps not literally but certainly variations of the despair and excessive drinking that might lead a man to murder. In "Night Tide" and "Between Darkness and Dawn," Big Sandy sings as a man whose strayed off the path of goodness and lost everything, left to "sing a sinner's song." In the Latin/Elvis sounding "Tequila Calling," the liquor beckons with a golden spell, calling him by name. The drink means oblivion and the unleashing of a fury and violence directed to the woman closest to him.

Big Sandy broaches Spade on the fourth track of the album in "When Sleep Won't Come (Blues for Spade)." Singing in first person, he describes Spade sitting in his jail cell, unable to sleep. When he closes his eyes, he is haunted by Ella Mae's face and her cries. It is almost an archetypal scene, echoing other songs like Johnny Cash's "Deliah," in which the singer shoots her and then pleads with the jailer that he can't sleep because of the "patter of Deliah's feet" around his bed. Big Sandy casts Spade in a somewhat sympathetic light, singing gently, and the chorus conveys the pain of a man who is sorry for himself but not sorry at all for killing his wife. What Big Sandy doesn't broach is the severity and utter ugliness of the crime itself.

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