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Commemorating the history
and great moments of the Western
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Guns and Guitars
-by Holly George-Warren
In the early 1930s, the vast popularity of Western movies began to ebb, thanks to the Great Depression and
the public’s embrace of gangster films glamorizing bad guys like Al Capone. But soon a new kind of star-nattily
dressed singing cowboys-brought audiences back in droves, while their nonmusical counterparts-cowboy heroes
played by William Boyd (better known as Hopalong Cassidy) and John Wayne-became the idols of several generations
of Western fans. |
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 Though ace rider Ken Maynard was officially the first cowboy actor to warble a song in a Western-1933’s
Fiddlin’ Buckaroo-it was radio star Gene Autry who turned the musical Western into a craze.
The Texas-born Autry was the first of more than a dozen singing cowboy film stars, though only Autry and his
fellow Republic Pictures colleague Roy Rogers became smash successes.
 After making a name for himself as Oklahoma’s
Yodelin’ Cowboy on multi-watt radio station WLS in Chicago and scoring such hits as "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine," Autry traveled to Hollywood in 1934 for a bit
part in Maynard’s In Old Santa Fe. Playing an entertainer at a barn dance, Autry got tons of fan mail, and
the idea was hatched to make an entire movie starring Autry playing himself crooning cowboy songs. In 1935
Autry made his first full-fledged musical Western, Tumbling Tumbleweeds, which developed a successful formula
that subsequent Autry vehicles would follow: Along with the music, the films featured a large dose of action,
with Gene galloping along on his horse Champion, as well as comedy, the latter provided by Autry’s sidekick
Smiley "Frog"Burnette (and later Pat Buttram).
When Autry left Hollywood to serve his country from 1942 to 1946, Republic pushed another of its singing
buckaroos into the spotlight, eventually naming him King of the Cowboys. Ohio-born Roy Rogers (formerly
Leonard Slye), a superb yodeler with the group Sons of the Pioneers, had gotten bit parts in Westerns since
the mid-1930s, including Autry’s The Old Corral, in 1936. Then two years later he replaced Autry in the 1938
picture Under Western Stars, after Autry walked off the set due to a salary dispute with Republic.
Rogers’ talented palomino Trigger and costar Dale Evans (billed third after Trigger) were almost as popular as Roy.
After Roy and Dale married in 1947, Evans became known as the Queen of the West.
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Following World War II, singing cowboy pictures began to lose their luster, but
action driven B-Westerns continued to proliferate into the 1950s. In the mid-’30s, Hollywood studios developed an assembly line system
for Western moviemaking that was economical and quick. Recycling was key. For the most part, structure, plots,
the contract player system, and locations established in the 1920s formed the basis for what was to come. In
addition, previously shot footage of posses and outlaws galloping across the desert or of a stagecoach
plummeting over a cliff could be used again and again in B-westerns.
One of the biggest Western stars to emerge in the 1930s was William Boyd, who in the 1920s had been a
matinee idol in films directed by Cecil B. DeMille and others. By the early ’30s, Boyd’s career had bottomed
out. Stardom returned with his characterization of Hopalong Cassidy, from the novel by Clarence
Mulford. Rather than a red-haired, mustachioed, hard-drinking varmint as depicted by
Mulford, Boyd’s Cassidy was a silver-haired, good-natured father figure. Boyd, along with his horse, Topper, acted in 54 Cassidy films
between 1935 and 1944; in 1946, Boyd produced the series himself, making a dozen or so more, as well as purchasing
the rights to the films along with the rights to merchandise the name and image of Hopalong Cassidy. Moving to
television in its infancy in 1948, he won millions of new fans, making a fortune in the process.
The model developed by Hoppy films was similar to that of Republic’s Three Mesquiteers series, based on
characters developed by novelist William Colt McDonald, who’d placed Americanized versions of Dumas’ Three
Musketeers within a Western setting. The popular Mesquiteers series ran from 1936 to 1943.
There is more inside the March/April 2003 issue of
American Cowboy magazine.
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