She's Too Pretty to Cry

Danny Hooper was born in Edmonton and grew up on his family’s cattle ranch near Tomahawk, Alberta. His professional career began in 1975, when he entered CFCW Radio’s first Country Star Search during Edmonton’s Klondike Days and won a recording contract with Royalty Records.

R. Harlan Smith produced his first Royalty sessions, which yielded ‘Empty Streets’, ‘I Didn’t Mean to Lose You’, ‘Please Don’t Wake the Dog Up’ and ‘Just a Part of Losing You’, the title song of his 1976 debut album. By the end of that year ‘Just a Part of Losing You’ was playing on stations across Canada, and the album was issued in the United Kingdom early in 1977. That March, Hooper was nominated for Best New Male Vocalist at the 1977 Juno Awards, in a field with Burton Cummings, Roger Doucet, Nestor Pistor and Wayne St. John. Cummings took the award. Hooper also appeared on CBC Edmonton’s On Stage during these years.

In 1979 he released Touching You with his band Country Spunk. Russell Thornberry produced the album at Sundown Recorders and Damon Productions in Edmonton, and Hooper wrote six of its ten songs, among them ‘Lookin’ Out the Window’, ‘Rena’s Bedroom’, ‘Fathers, Hide Your Daughters’ and ‘Back in Austin’. The title song, written by R. Harlan Smith, made RPM’s country chart.

In November 1979, Hooper and his father Don, who was also his manager and business partner, opened Danny Hooper’s Stockyard in a former church at 10635 96 Street in Edmonton. The Stockyard was a steakhouse, dance hall and country music showroom, with Hooper as host and Country Spunk as the house band, and it became the Edmonton stop for touring country acts. Merle Haggard played there on Easter Sunday 1982. Tammy Wynette, Ray Price, Tom T. Hall, Asleep at the Wheel, Ferlin Husky, Faron Young, Freddy Fender, Gene Watson, Little Jimmy Dickens, John Conlee and Claude King all worked the room, and Ian Tyson became a regular after he moved back to Alberta from Toronto. Local players shared the stage with the headliners, and several went on to session and touring careers.

Guitarist Redd Volkaert spent a couple of years in Country Spunk alongside fiddler Calvin Vollrath before going on to a long run in Merle Haggard’s band, and he later named Hooper among the bandleaders who taught him both the music and the business.

With the club established, Hooper went to Nashville to record She’s Too Pretty to Cry with producer Eddie Kilroy and released it on his own Saddletramp label. RPM’s June 1982 review picked out the title track, ‘If I Keep On Going Crazy’, ‘Whiskey River’ and Hooper’s own ‘Sick and Tired of It All’, and ‘She’s Too Pretty to Cry’ went on to chart. An album called Eleven Roses followed in 1983.

The Stockyard closed on January 4, 1986. A photograph from that day shows the sign out front reading “We’re Movin’ On” over the words “End of the Trail.” That same year Hooper started working as a charity auctioneer, a second career that has since helped organizations raise more than $500 million.

His 1995 album The John Deere Tractor Keys drew on western Canadian country and rodeo life with songs like ‘Country Songwriter’, ‘Before the Rodeo’, ‘Eight Seconds at a Time’ and ‘The Last Bull Ride’, and the title song became the one most closely tied to his name. In 1997 he went back to Nashville for a new Eleven Roses, co-produced with Redd Volkaert at Fireside Recording Studio with Jody Maphis, Larry Franklin and Tommy White in the band. It shared only its title song with the 1983 album.

The Stockyard Collection, released in 1999, returned to the music that had filled the club. Produced by Derek Stremel, with Volkaert on lead guitar, it gathered songs associated with Stockyard headliners including Merle Haggard, Faron Young, Leroy Van Dyke, Tammy Wynette, Claude King, Ferlin Husky and Ray Price, and closed out with a four-song Ian Tyson medley of ‘Someday Soon’, ‘Summer Wages’, ‘Four Strong Winds’ and ‘Navajo Rug’. Peter North wrote the liner essay.

That same year Hooper launched the Danny Hooper Classic Country Hall Tour, which took traditional country through Alberta dance halls and out to fairs in the United States. A live album with his band the Honky Tonk Heroes came out in 2001, covering songs made famous by Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Marty Robbins and Lefty Frizzell. The tour ran into 2003.

In 2003 he cut 31 Days in Austin with Volkaert at Wire Recording in Austin, Texas, pairing new songs such as ‘Blue and Broken Hearted’, ‘We’re Not Even Talkin’’ and ‘Drive Him Out of My Mind’ with fresh versions of ‘Back in Austin’, ‘Lookin’ Out the Window’, ‘What’s a Girl Gonna Do (With a Boy Like That)’ and ‘The John Deere Tractor Keys’. He then set songwriting and recording aside for several years.

In 2006 Hooper returned to CFCW, the station behind the contest that launched him, to co-host the morning show with Sharon Mallon. The pair won the Canadian Country Music Association award for Major Market Radio Personalities of the Year. He also created the television series BSN: The Barn Satellite Network, wrote a weekly humour column for the Edmonton Sun, and has been the main-stage host at the Big Valley Jamboree in Camrose since the mid-1990s. Along the way he played the Grand Ole Opry and performed seven straight years at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.

Hooper returned to recording with the single ‘I’ll Get Along’ in 2018 and the album Forgiven in 2020. Its nine songs include ‘Find a Honky Tonk’, ‘Hole in the Bucket’, ‘I Need a Buck’, ‘Step Aside’, ‘Little Log Cabin’ and the title song, along with a 25th-anniversary recording of ‘John Deere Tractor Keys’.

In March 2025, fifty years after the CFCW Country Star Search, Country Music Alberta inducted Danny Hooper into its Hall of Fame.

-Robert Williston