Gene Mooney, a cousin to famous steel guitarist and composer Ralph Mooney, led a country and western swing band for many years, it seems. He is not quite a well-known name in historian or collector circles. He recorded around a handful of records in the 1960s and 1970s and appeared steadily around Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the same time frame.
Mooney was born Eugene H. Mooney on November 21, 1926, in Borger in the northern corner of Texas, not too far away from the state of Oklahoma. Apparently, he made the move to Oklahoma at some point in his life and began a career in music. By the late 1950s, Mooney fronted a local country and western swing outfit he called "The Westernaires" that appeared around Tulsa and other areas in Oklahoma. By Novemver 1958, Mooney and the band became regulars at Leon McAuliffe's Cimarron Ballroom. In addition to his personal appearances, Mooney also appeared on local radio and in August 1960, Mooney took over a morning DJ show over KMUS in Muskogee, Oklahoma. His band became a long-running act in the Tulsa area and over the years, featured many different musicians, including well-known steel guitarist Billy Parker.
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| Billboard October 20, 1958 Marvin McCullough was a local Oklahoma DJ that regularly appeared with Mooney during the late 1950s. McCullough later replaced Leon McAuliffe and Johnnie Lee Wills on local radio. |
In 1972 and 1973, Mooney had two releases on the local Tulsa based Merit Records and somewhere in between - or even before the Flat-Git-It release - his Rocket disc came into existence. Rocket Records was a custom label from Nashville, Tennessee, that issued discs in the late 1950s and probably early 1960s. Mooney's release featured "Trouble with the Blues" b/w "No One" (Rocket #911) but no release date can be given or estimated, as the Rocket releases followed no systematical pattern.
Since at least 1971, Mooney and the Westernaires sometimes appeared at Cain's Ballroom, a now legendary venue in Tulsa known for appearances by western swing stars such as Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan. At that time, the ballroom was still owned by Jim Hardcastle, who sold it to a 83-years old lady named Marie L. Myers in February 1972. Myers had shown up one night at Cain's and obviously fell in love with Mooney's singing. "She went down there one night and asked him to sing 'Hello Darlin'' to her. That was it," remembered Hardcastle how Myers and Mooney first met. Myers bought the venue and made Mooney and the Westernaires the house band of the ballroom. From Hardcastle's statements, it seems that she made the decision on her own to buy Cain's, although she later said that Mooney talked her into buying the place.
Freddie Hart played Cain's early in 1972 - he had been still booked by Hardcastle - and Mooney and the Westernaires were supposed to be Hart's background band that night. Hart had sent records to Hardcastle to learn for Mooney and the band. The night Hart performed there, the place was packed but as it turned out, Mooney and the band had only practiced Hart's big hit "Easy Lovin'", believing the rest of the set list would be easy enough to handle with improvisation, which was not the case and made Hart mad.
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| Catalog of Copyright Entries 1973 |
However, under Myers' ownership, only few people attended Cain's when the Westernaires played solo, although Myers kept it open every Saturday night with Mooney and the band performing. There may have been more than one reason for the small crowds that attended. One reason was missing promotion. Though she got better advice from Hardcastle, Myers never advertised on local newspaper. In addition, it seems that Mooney was not a favorite of the audiences. Hardcastle recalled Mooney singing "a different type of country song" and although he seemed to be not a bad singer, his style of singing appeared not to be a crowd-drawer.
Mooney left Cain's in late 1973 to unknown reasons. Several witnesses indicate that Mooney's and Myers' relationship was more than business-based (whatever that means), it seems that they perhaps had a fall-out over some issue. What Mooney did after he left Cain's is unknown. Myers sold the venue not long after Mooney's departure to Larry Shaeffer, a part-time steel guitarist who had auditioned earlier unsuccessfully for Mooney's band and managed to establish the ballroom as one of the city's top live music venues again.
Gene Mooney passed away June 14, 1982, in Tulsa at the age of 55 years. He is buried at Cookson-Proctor Cemetery in Cookson, Oklahoma.
If anyone has more information on Gene Mooney, please feel free to contact me.
• 45cat entry
• Find a Grave entry
• John Wooley, Brett Bingham: "Twentieth-Century Honky-Tonk" (Babylon Books), 2020
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