It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. So it would take an encyclopedia to define the music of Spade Cooley. Because swing Cooley's music surely did, loud and loose and lively.

A little man with a flattened face and a broad, amiable grin, the Oklahoma-born Cooley was one of the earliest stars of western swing. In fact, it was to describe Spade's music that Billboard invented the phrase in 1944, when the energetic fiddler was at the height of his fame and shooting to the top of the charts with singles like “Shame on You.”

So popular was the Spade Cooley Orchestra during the late '40s that, eventually, there was more than one — Cooley would open a show in one southern California neighborhood, play a few numbers, then taxi to another club and join a different “Spade Cooley Orchestra” show already in progress! Although married and a father, Spade had a wandering eye, and was known to be kanoodlin' when he might oughtta be toodlin'. He also had a black temper, which flared up with his band members frequently. He fired musicians at the drop of a note. And Lord, he drank something fierce.

In 1945, he hired a gorgeous 21-year-old blonde named Ella Mae Evans. His band knew the new girl couldn't sing her way out of a paper bag, but Cooley was smitten. Within a year, Spade had divorced his first wife and married Ella Mae.

But the gravy was dribbling to an end. By 1950, Cooley had amassed a fortune of more than $15 million... but in the wake of rock n' roll, the music industry was closing its doors to him. Meanwhile, he had become ferociously jealous of his young wife (despite his own ongoing adulteries). He was convinced she had slept with Roy Rogers. He obsessed over his notion that she was going to join a free-sex cult with some of his business associates. By 1961, his marriage in tatters, Cooley was popping pills and washing 'em down with copious gulps of whiskey.

The story of Spade Cooley screeched to a horrifying crescendo on the night of April 3. Cooley was drunk when he pulled up to the Willow Springs home where his wife and daughter lived. In the purple heat of a jealous rage, he proceeded to beat, kick and strangle Ella Mae. When their 14-year-old daughter, Melody, arrived at the house at 6:20 p.m., Cooley dragged the girl into the bathroom, where her mother lay slumped in the shower. He forced his daughter to watch as he continued his assault, beating, kicking and burning her mother with cigarettes. He told his daughter she would have to watch while he killed Ella Mae — but according to the coroner, later, the deed had probably already been done. Authorities estimated the woman had been dead for several hours by the time Cooley finally called for an ambulance around 11.

Cooley spent the next eight years in prison, until the state granted him parole, which was to begin on his 60th birthday, in February 1970. But four months before that, after being allowed to play a concert for the Alameda County Sheriff's Department, he was felled by a massive heart attack. Spade Cooley was dead. His music and his shame live on.

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Notes is supported by the Gay and Lesbian Fund, helping the American Heart Association teach heart healthy habits in Colorado.