Published in Granta in 1984, the novella includes a photo of the couple during their heyday in the late 1940s. In contrast to this cruel and twisted description, Spade is grinning and looking off to the right. He wears a flashy western shirt with embroidered fiddles and music notes, a scarf knotted around his throat. Ella Mae looks straight into the camera with a big smile, round faced and her hair pinned up in smooth curls. I search the photo for a glimmer of meanness in his eyes, but it reveals little of the tensions and jealousies that fueled their relationship.
Ella Mae Evans started as a clarinet player in his Cooley's band, and she became his second wife in 1945 just as he was gaining real success as a musician and bandleader in California. Cooley's family moved to Modesto from Oklahoma in the 1930s to escape the Dust Bowl. During the 1940s a strong country music scene developed on the West Coast, and California was a hot spot for ballroom performances and big radio barn dances. The first venue to open was the Venice Pier Ballroom in 1942, and it catered to Oakie transplants, industry workers, and servicemen. Cooley, a fiddler player, took over the band at the Venice Pier Ballroom and by 1946 he was in Santa Monica playing to sold out crowds.4 By all accounts, Cooley claimed the title "The King of Western Swing" before it was applied to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.
Spade parlayed his success as a musician into an acting career, playing bit roles as a cowboy in Roy Rogers movies. His fame grew in the early 1950s when he hosted a television variety show. But by the end of the decade, his career was in serious decline. The show cancelled, Cooley shifted his interest to real estate and plans for a theme park in the desert. Hard drinking and numerous heart attacks eroded his health. By March, 1961 the marriage disintegrated and Cooley filed for divorce citing incompatibility. He gained custody of their two children, Melody and her younger brother Donnell. Yet it seemed that Ella Mae wanted some kind of reconciliation, or at the very least, wound up back at their ranch outside of Mojave the night he killed her.
On Night Tides, Big Sandy seems to be searching for some kind of vindication for Ella Mae Evans. In the song "Nothing to Lose," played as a waltz, he reverses the scenario and describes a woman who murders her husband after suffering years of abuse. It is the most explicit song on the album, detailing how she contemplates the act, shoots him, and then kills herself, the whole sad story summarized in a few newspaper lines. It is also the album's weakest track, too sentimental and lacking the dramatic tension in the songs surrounding Cooley's crime.
Cooley's story does not end in Vacaville He adjusted to prison life and spent his time making violins, teaching music, and leading an all-inmate band. In August 1969, the parole board unanimously recommended parole effective February 22, 1970. A few months before his release, he was allowed to play a sheriff's benefit before an audience of 3,000 in Oakland. When a reporter questioned him about his past and future, Spade replied, "I think its gonna work out for me; I have the feeling that today is the first day of the rest of my life."5 Here was a man looking toward his freedom, originally sentenced to life for killing his wife with his own hands and in front of his own daughter. He served only eight years, allowed to return home for good behavior. Spade finished the show and received a standing ovation, walked off stage, and dropped dead of a heart attack. Spade Cooley, murderer, was relegated to obscurity and Bob Wills reclaimed the title of the "King of Western Swing."
1 "Hollywood Noir" from www.hotad.com/spade.HTML.
2 Ibid.
3James Ellroy, "Dick Contino's Blues," Granta 46 (Winter 1994): 24.
4Bill Malone, Country Music USA (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997) 201.
5Rich Kienzle, "The Strange, Tragic Case of Spade Cooley," Country Music July 1977: 64.
