Spade Cooley & The Western Swing Dance Gang: Shame On You

Country music has no shortage of tortured, troubled artists, but from his music you wouldn't peg Spade Cooley as one of them. Dubbing himself "King Of The Western Swing," Bob Wills and others be damned, Cooley helped popularize the form in the '40s, becoming one of the names most associated with the peculiar and extremely lively mixture of country, jazz, Tex Mex, and polka. There's something inherently life-affirming about western swing: Wills always punctuated even the most melancholy lyrics with his cheery, yelping exclamations of encouragement, but, as this new collection of previously unreleased mid-'40s radio tracks by one of his rivals illustrates, the genre retains its upbeat quality even without Wills' trademark interruptions. Nothing in the music Cooley, a fiddler and bandleader par excellence, recorded suggests a man who would spend his final decade in prison for killing his wife in front of their children. Instead, Shame On You captures Cooley in top, unflaggingly cheery form, blazing through 22 songs from an instrumental version of the venerable "Corrine, Corrina" to the self-penned "Cowbell Polka" to "Shame On You," his signature number. On that song and eight others, singer Tex Williams joins Cooley and the gang, his honeyed vocals slowing things down a bit. Nonetheless, Williams' presence helps prove the genre's flexibility, while illustrating that even its sad songs sound like something to which you can forget your troubles, even if those who created it could not.