Three Miles South of Cash - Bob Wills and Carolina Cotton

We're in full Western Swing mode here at Dreamtime, this time around with a video of Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys from 19 and 51, featuring a semi-duet of Three Miles South of Cash between Wills and Carolina Cotton, who performs her signature yodelin' as Wills tries to keep pace.

This is from a so-called "Snader Telescription," one of television's first music videos. Snaders were 3-4 minute films shot live and produced from around 1950 until late 1953 or early `54, according to this site. The brainchild of Louis D. Snader, a Southern California real estate developer, almost all of the several hundred Snader Telescriptions were written, produced, and directed by a Duke Goldstone, who even helped design many of the sets. Goldstone could shoot as many as 12 Snaders in one day.

A bigger live draw than Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman in his heyday during in the 1940s, Wills career was winding down by 1951, as was Western Swing itself. He'd have one last Top Ten hit with Faded Love in 1950, although he'd continuing performing into the late `60s. The Yodelin' Blonde Bombshell - Carolina Cotton - was a featured songbird in the Spade Cooley, Deuce Spriggins (to whom she was briefly married), Hank Penny, and Bob Wills bands, as well as cutting her own singles.

Cotton appeared in several B Westerns as well as in some of the first "Soundies," an even earlier precursor to music videos (although the audio was taped, rather than performed live). Cotton was also one of the first female deejays, as well as a television pioneer. She turned down the role of Annie Oakley (later played by Gail Davis) to develop her own series, Queen of the Range, although the show was never aired. In the early `60s, Cotton retired from her entertainment career, earned her Masters Degree in Special Education, and taught at several schools in California. She'd occasionally still perform at Western Swing fan conferences and charity events into the late `90s, before passing away in 1997.

Cotton had a fascinating career, and you could learn more about her and her life at carolinacotton.org, a great site maintained by her family.

Hank Penny - Missouri

I need to do a Dreamtime episode on the Western Swing phenomena of the `40s and `50s, which has just a ton of great subject matter and characters to write about, including Carolina Cotton - "the Yodelin' Blonde Bombshell" - who you can see on bass in this clip, and Spade Cooley, the King of Western Swing, whose life played out like a James Ellroy noir novel.

Here we have the Deuce Spriggins Orchestra, featuring Hank Penny, doing Missouri. Spriggins - real name George Braunsdorf - and Cotton (Helen Hagstrom) were secretly married in 1945, and left Spade Cooley's band that same year, taking many of Cooley's musicians with them to form their own band. Spriggins and Cotton would be divorced the following year, with few people knowing that they had been married.

Hank Penny, whose 1950s hit Bloodshot Eyes was featured on Dreamtime 39, was born Herbert Clayton Penny on September 18, 1918, in Birmingham, AL. By the age of 15, he was performing professionally on local radio, and had formed his own band, The Radio Cowboys, before he turned 18.

By the mid-'40s, Penny was in Los Angeles, and had been recruited to front one of the pseudo-Spade Cooley bands that were operating throughout the country. Cooley's popularity was at such a height during the 1940s that the real Spade Cooley Orchestra couldn't fill all its bookings, so Cooley's manager simply formed several more Western Swing bands and sent them on the road under the Spade Cooley brand.

After later stints as band leader, deejay, and club owner, Penny joined Cooley's wildly popular television program in 1948 as a comic backwoods type known as "That Plain Ol' Country Boy." A year later, Penny cut Hillbilly Bebop, an attempt to reclaim the audience Western Swing was losing to the new bop music, and the more successful hit of 1950, Bloodshot Eyes.

Penny later would become a co-owner of the legendary Palomino Club, hosted his own television series, The Hank Penny Show, which was canceled after only a few weeks, and have a much more successful seven-year run at the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. He'd later moved to Nashville, and audition for the hosting slot of Hee Haw, a job he'd lose to Roy Clark. He passed away in 1992.*

*Note: Hank's widow, Shari, was kind enough to contact me with the correct dates of Hank's birth and death and I've edited the post to reflect those dates  Shari notes that the Hank Penny official web site will be online within the month, and we'll link to it when it goes live.  Thank you, Shari!