Tag Archives: Gene Autry

08.19.25
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Way Out West, Part II

AMAZON UPDATE:

My publisher’s KDP account has been reinstated, and all her books are now back up on Amazon, including my best-selling immigrant epic The Price of Passage and also the heartwarming coming-of-age story, Izzy Strikes Gold! But apparently, it took the credible threat of legal action to do it.

FORTUNATELY,

we do not rely on Amazon to get our books in people’s hands. You can purchase either or both of these books direct from the publisher by clicking these links: Izzy and Passage.

Thank you for your unwavering support of fine literature from small, independent presses.

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

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Now for this week’s post:

By the time Your New Favorite Writer was a boy, in the 1950s, “the West” no longer applied to any place east of the Mississippi. The states of the old Northwest Territory were now called “the Midwest.” The term had expanded to include the first tier of trans-Mississippi states: Minnesota, Iowa, and perhaps Missouri. 

An 1846 map of the realm we now think of as the West. Public Domain.

One of the so-called border states, Missouri had been a slave state from 1820 till the Civil War, and only by force of arms was it kept from joining the Secession. Still, Missourians talked and acted pretty much like us, so we reckoned they were Midwesterners. As for states below Missouri—Arkansas and Louisiana—those were still the Old South, my friend.

States west of that first tier, and extending all the way to the Coast, were what we now meant by “the West.” In our minds, it was the Old West, the Wild West. It was the domain of the cowboys. 

Riders of the Plains

And we had plenty of cowboys. Besides actual cowpokes who did dusty and deadly jobs to bring us the beefsteaks we were starting to get attached to, there were also the Real Cowboys—that is to say, the heroes of the Silver Screen.

My dad grew up in the Depression days of the 1930s. Admission at the local cinema was a dime for a child, or two kids for fifteen cents. Dad would sell some old newspapers, rags, or scrap metal to rustle up a nickel. Then he’d wait till a pal came along with a whole dime of his own. Dad would add his nickel, and the two would enter for fifteen cents. Not much chance they were buying popcorn.

Tom Mix, c. 1925. Photo by Albert Witzel. Public Domain.

They followed the Wild West exploits of Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, top guns of the second generation of movie cowboys. By the time Dad came along, the gritty realism of William S. Hart had given way to glamor. Tom Mix, a former ranch hand, parlayed his cowpunching skills, physique, and ready smile into gigantic stardom, appearing in 291 films—all but nine of them silent. Mix played the handsome hero in a dashing cowboy outfit. His transportation, Tony the Wonder Horse, became a star in his own right. 

Hoot Gibson, Dad’s other favorite, was a rodeo champion who turned to film work in the 1920s. Like Mix, he did his own stunts, but his roles were more humorous and light-hearted. He led the first rank of cowboys-other-than-Tom-Mix, along with Ken Maynard and Bob Steele.

Hoot Gibson, right, with Charles K. French, in The Bearcat (1922). Public Domain. 

The Big Three

By the time I came along in the 1950s, a third generation of cowboys rode the cinematic range: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy. These luminaries shone all the more brightly to me, since I approached them mainly through the non-visual medium of radio. They all had radio shows as well as films. I didn’t often go to the movies, but the radio was on every night in our house. Roy and Gene were singers, and their weekly programs featured a lot of western music. 

The Sons of the Pioneers in 1944. Bob Nolan center, Roy Rogers second from right. Fair use.

Roy Rogers was often backed up by the Sons of the Pioneers, a stellar Western singing group he had co-founded in the 1930s, along with Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer. Their hits, written by Nolan, included “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Cool, Clear Water.” Roy, billed as “King of the Cowboys,” was also joined by his wife Dale Evans, “the Queen of the West.” 

Roy and Dale on Trigger, at Placerita Canyon, California, late 1940s. Fair use.

Roy’s horse, Trigger, eclipsed Tom Mix’s Tony and all other movie cowboy horses. A large, gorgeous golden palomino stallion, Trigger learned 150 trick cues, could walk fifty feet on his hind legs, and was even housebroken—an unusual ability in a horse, but one which came in handy when he and his master appeared in hotels, theaters, and hospitals. After Trigger’s death in 1965, Rogers had his hide preserved and mounted by a taxidermist and put on display in the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum. Your New Favorite Author had the good fortune to see Trigger at the museum not long before it closed in 2009.

Roy’s wife, Dale, known for championing children born with disabilities and for her strong Christian faith, was also a songwriter of some note, author of the couple’s television sign-off song, “Happy Trails,” and the 1955 gospel hit “The Bible Tells Me So.”

Gene Autry came to be called the Singing Cowboy—a great pre-emptive advertising claim. There were a lot of singing cowboys, but Gene was The Singing Cowboy. He held first place in Motion Picture Herald’s “Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars” poll from 1937 to 1942, at which point he went into the Army Air Corps, because there was a war on. When he told Republic Pictures of his plans to enlist, they threatened to promote Roy Rogers as “King of the Cowboys” in his absence, and they followed through on that. When Autry returned from service, he was still a Republic property and needed promotion, so they billed him as “King of the Singing Cowboys.” But Rogers had already overtaken him at the box office. 

Autry and his horse Champion left Republic for Columbia Pictures in 1947, and he chose a new sidekick, Pat Buttram, in place of his former sidekick Smiley Burnett. Both Rogers and Autry also benefited from the presence of George “Gabby” Hayes as sidekick in many of their earlier films.

 Gene Autry and Smiley Burnette singing in In Old Santa Fe (1934). Public Domain.

The role of America’s Singing Cowboy fit Autry well, and he lived up to it. I listened to his radio progam, Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch, every Saturday night. Listening to the show was my reward for taking a bath! The show offered a variety of Gene’s western adventures with radio sound effects, with comic relief by Pat Buttram, and a few Gene Autry songs backed by the Cass County Boys. Gene had a friendly tenor voice, and in addition to his theme song, “Back in the Saddle Again,” and other western songs, he made a fortune in the holiday song business, starting with the original recording of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”  He also laid down memorable tracks of “Frosty the Snowman,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and for Easter, “Here Comes Peter Cottontail (Hoppin’ Down the Bunny Trail).” 

Wikipedia notes that Gene Autry “is the only person to be awarded stars in all five categories on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for film, television, music, radio, and live performance.”

Movie poster for the 1936 film Hopalong Cassidy Returns, starring William Boyd. Public Domain.

The third major cowboy of our era, Hopalong Cassidy, was in a class by himself. For one thing, he made no pretense of singing. But boy, did he have a nifty outfit! Hoppy dressed all in black, with a tall black hat that dwarfed Roy’s and Gene’s white ones. The black duds were set off nicely by a silver ox-skull neckerchief slide, silver-white hair, and the great white horse, Topper. 

The original Cassidy, as depicted thirteen years earlier on the cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, December 15, 1923. Public Domain.

It was all an effect orchestrated by producer Harry “Pop” Sherman and movie star William Boyd, who played the role of Hoppy. The character Hopalong Cassidy was transformed from the hard-drinking, rough-living, profane cowboy created by author Clarence Mulford in a series of pulp stories and dime novels and became the more polished, clean-living straight shooter portrayed by Boyd in the films. 

Hopalong’s 54 feature films produced from 1935 to 1944 were better productions than typical cowboy films of the day, so they got favorable exposure by exhibitors. When producer Sherman tired of the franchise and moved on to other projects, Boyd produced twelve more Cassidy films on his own, on a much lower budget. In 1948, when the series was considered dead, Boyd purchased the rights to all 66 films for $350,000. 

He brought one of the films to a Los Angeles NBC television station and offered it for showing at a nominal rental. It went over so well they asked for more, and Hopalong Cassidy began a burgeoning new career on TV.

TV! Wait a minute! Who said anything about TV? 

Perhaps you noticed, Dear Reader, that I have mentioned movie cowboys and radio cowboys but have not whispered a word about a stunning new invention that was about to rework our lives. 

Next week: Television cowboys. Stay tuned.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

08.12.25
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Way Out West, Part I.

ATTENTION: Owing to some kind of error in the huge, unresponsive bureaucracy of Kindle Direct Publishing, part of Amazon, many of my outstanding small-press publisher’s books are no longer listed on Amazon.com. This includes my Amazon Best-seller immigrant saga The Price of Passage and also the heartwarming coming-of-age story, Izzy Strikes Gold! 

FORTUNATELY, we do not rely on Amazon to get our books in people’s hands. You can purchase either or both of these books direct from the publisher by clicking these links: Izzy and Passage.

Thank you for your unwavering support of fine literature from small, independent presses.

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

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AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:

Howdy, Pardner—

The main premise of this blog is that we are seeking new meanings in our common past. To do that, we must periodically examine the past. Let’s get back to that, shall we?

A long journey Your New Favorite Writer completed last May reminded me of how very much I have been impressed by the American West. I suppose that’s partly because it has always been “the Old West.” 

In the United States, the East is older than the West. But it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, the Far West—California, for example, was settled by the Spaniards before the Pilgrims ever thought of coming to Plymouth Rock.

“The Flight Across the Lake,” oil on canvas by N. C. Wyeth, was one of 17 paintings Wyeth did for Charles Scribner’s Son’s publication of  The Last of the Mohicans. “The Flight Across the Lake” is in the collections of the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Fair use.

But even the history of the Anglo-Saxon West is complicated. Because in the eyes of our dominant, English-speaking culture, the West used to be in the East. Our “Western Frontier” started in the middle of Massachusetts and gradually extended to include upstate New York and Eastern Pennsylvania. That was “the West.”

Don’t believe me? Just ask James Fennimore Cooper. He was the author of our first “western” novels, such as The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826). They featured sturdy frontiersman Natty Bumppo and his Indian companions Uncas and Chingachgook, ranging over the country and fighting frontier battles against Frenchmen and hostile Indians, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. 

A few years later, the West migrated all the way to the eastern shore of the Mississippi River. The area we now call the Upper Midwest—the part of the country where I live—was the Northwest Territory when we won it from the United Kingdom in the Revolutionary War. The name was codified in the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787, two years before the Constitution was adopted.The Northwest Territory comprised all the land east of the northwest of the Ohio River, to the Mississippi. 

The Northwest Territory in 1787. Map from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

If you will check a large map, Dear Reader, you will see that even the mighty Mississippi is only one third of the way over. So the West was still, demonstrably, in the eastern half of the country. Or at least, in the eastern half of the vast continent that eventually became our country.

A portion of the Northwest Territory that later became part of the State of Ohio was originally reserved as a disconnected parcel of land belonging to the State of Connecticut. It was known as the Connecticut Western Reserve. (There’s that term, “Western,” again.) Eventually Connecticut divested itself of this property, but to this day the northeastern corner of Ohio is called the Western Reserve. It’s the home of Case Western Reserve University. Another famous institution in the Northwest Territory, a bit further west, is Northwestern University of Evanston, Illinois.

Ulysses S. Grant, c. 1863. Public Domain.

Even as lately as the Civil War (1861-65), all the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi was known in common parlance as “the West.” The area beyond the Father of Waters was called “the Trans-Mississippi West,” or just “the Trans-Mississippi.”  Those of us who read Civil War history books know that Generals Grant and Sherman came out of the Western armies—that is, the armies that fought in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and only very occasionally in Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, the eastern edge of the Trans-Mississippi.

William T. Sherman, c. 1864. Public Domain.

When Ulysses S. Grant came east in 1864 to fight Lee’s Army in Virginia, he left William Tecumseh Sherman in charge of “the Western campaign,” which turned out to be—get this—marching southeast from Chattanooga in East Tennessee to attack Atlanta in north-central Georgia and eventually Savannah, on the Atlantic Coast. That was the Western campaign!

Horace Greeley, 1860s. Public Domain.

But I digress. As early as 1838, New York editor Horace Greeley was saying, “Go West, young man,” a position he maintained for the rest of his life. He needn’t have bothered: It was bound to happen with or without his advice. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 sparked a mass migration to the West Coast, by ship or overland. By the time of the Civil War, even though common terminology still placed the West in the East, the vast lands between the Mississippi and the Pacific were starting to fill with settlers. 

Stephen A. Douglas, Senate sponsor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

In fact, it was the squabble over whether those lands would be admitted to the Union as free or slave states—especially the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which upset the delicate balance engineered by the earlier Missouri Compromise of 1820—that precipitated the outbreak of hostilities between North and South.

By the time I was a little boy, in the 1950s—eighty and more years after Sherman’s March to the Sea—the Trans-Mississippi West had become largely, if sparsely, settled, all the way to the Coast. It had become the only thing people meant when they talked about the West. 

Roy Rogers teaches a young Indonesian visitor how to use a lasso, 1950s. Public Domain.

So that’s what I, the Fifties Kid, thought the West was. And to me, it was a wonderful place: the domain of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy. The place where the buffalo roamed, where the deer and the antelope played, where hostile Indians were forever circling and attacking innocent pioneers in wagon trains, where the tumbleweeds tumbled, and all a thirsty prospector could hope for was a drink of cool, clear water.

But that’s material for next week. See you then.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer