Singing Cowboys
GENE AUTRY
Way Out West in Texas
In the Jailhouse Now
TEX RITTER
Streets of Laredo
Boll Weevil
Perhaps no icon of Texas music is as loved or as lasting as the singing cowboy. Hollywood’s western movies glorified the Texas cowboy. On screen, the brave knight of the plains was equally at home chasing bad guys, roping steer, or strummin’ his guitar and singing about the splendor and beauty of the Wild West. Two of the most popular of the singing cowboys were Gene Autry and Tex Ritter.
Gene Autry, grew up in Tioga, Texas. Like most children in the area, he picked cotton and attended school. In 1924 he became a railroad operator. In his spare time, he played guitar and sang. Autry started his professional music career by emulating his idol Jimmie Rodgers, known as “The Father of Country Music.” When Autry went to New York in the late 1920s, he recorded cover versions of Jimmie Rodgers’s hits. Autry himself had an enormous hit with the sentimental pop ballad, “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.” Art Satherley, Autry's manager, urged him to adopt a completely western persona. Satherly insisted that dressing in western style clothing and performing western-themed songs was crucial to Autry’s success. Autry moved to Chicago, took publicity photos in his new western clothes, and by 1932 had settled into his new image. He became famous for his show on radio station WLS. His announcer, Ian Williams, created a romantic but false story of his life, claiming he was “Born into the saddle, a hard-riding, straight-shootin’, carefree cowboy, singing the songs as he had learned them on the range around the campfire.” Autry later recalled, “I sang cowboy songs not because I felt the listeners like them better but because Art Satherley insisted upon it. Ian began to talk of sagebrush and tumbleweeds. That sort of stuff didn’t sound very glamorous to me as my recollections of ranch life included aching muscles.” Nevertheless, he went along with the charade and became a very popular radio performer.
Like Autry, Tex Ritter began his life in a small farming community in Texas where he was raised on church music. Attending high school in the relatively large city of Nederland, Ritter finished high school as senior class president with two years of involvement in his school’s glee club. A glee club is a musical group which traditionally specializes in the singing of short songs by trios or quartets. In 1922 he entered the University of Texas at Austin, where he eventually became president of the glee club. Unlike Autry, Ritter developed an interest in western songs and began researching and collecting cowboy music, including what became his signature song, “Rye Whiskey.” In 1925 he assembled a program of western songs for the university glee club and developed an academic lecture with musical accompaniment entitled, “The American Cowboy and his Songs.” When Ritter went to New York in 1928 he encountered the same cowboy fever that Art Satherley had discovered. In early 1930 he was cast in “Green Grow the Lilacs,” a play featuring cowboy songs which became the basis for the enormously successful musical, “Oklahoma!” When the play closed he was cast in another western production and he soon began a successful run as one of the top western radio personalities in New York. Art Satherley took Ritter into the studio in 1932, where Ritter made his first recording. Many more recordings would follow, and throughout the early 1930s he gained fame and success as a western performer.
Even before sound came to the movies, screen cowboys such as Tom Mix had created well-defined Texas personas. The Texas identity was very marketable, and as sound and music came to western films, Gene Autry and Tex Ritter were a natural fit. Autry and Ritter embraced their western personas, both on and off screen, for the rest of their lives. They’ll be remembered as the good guys, brave heroes of the silver screen, singing cowboys.