Roy Rogers

Singer, film and television star

Restless Family

Breaking Into Western Music

Into the Movies

Remarriage and Personal Tragedy

Selected discography

Sources

The great wellspring of American mythology suggested by the figure of the cowboy may have reached its high watermark with Roy Rogers. Singing cowboy films emanated rapidly from Hollywood between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, and Roy Rogers was one of the most renowned of the performers that appeared in them. He inherited from Gene Autry the title of “King of the Cowboys” and kept it for what in Hollywood’s terms qualifies as eons.

Rogers made 91 films in all, went on to a successful television career after that, and released dozens of 78 rpm and LP recordings. In late 1991, at the age of 79, he ascended the country sales charts with a new album pairing him in duets with leading contemporary singers in the country genre. He achieved worldwide fame—Collier’s reported in 1948 that he had edged out Bing Crosby as England’s biggest box-office draw—and inspired the creation of thousands of fan clubs, whose members took to the Rogers legend wholeheartedly and churned out an unprecedented volume of fan mail.

It was not simply good looks and Hollywood promotion that generated and sustained Rogers’s popularity. His own musical activities helped to launch his film career: he founded the Sons of the Pioneers, the greatest of the Western musical acts that flourished along with the cowboy movie craze, and his energy kept the group together when its other members were ready to throw in the towel. Rogers’s musical accomplishments marked the beginning of a spectacular success story. But they took shape in the midst of a serious Depression-era struggle of the kind faced by so many Americans.

Restless Family

Rogers was born Leonard Franklin Slye on November 5, 1911, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Andrew, worked in a shoe factory, and the family lived in a tenement near where the Cincinnati Reds’ Riverfront Stadium now stands. The Slye family, like many others in industrializing America, was restless, torn between farm life and steady but demoralizing urban wage-earning. They traveled up the Ohio River in a homemade houseboat when young Leonard was a year old, spent several years in the city of Portsmouth, and ended up on a farm in Duck Run, Ohio, 12 miles back in the hills. Andrew Slye continued to work in Portsmouth, and at times would go two weeks without returning home.

Both parents and all three of Leonard’s sisters were musical—his father had entertained professionally on a river steamer for a time—and before his voice changed Leonard began to participate fully in the musical life of a

For the Record…

Born Leonard Franklin Slye, November 5, 1911, in Cincinnati, OH; married Arlene Wilkins, 1936 (died, 1946); married Dale Evans, 1947; children: Roy, Jr., Robin Elizabeth (deceased), John (deceased), Cheryl, Linda Lou, Marion, Scottish Ward, Mary, Little Doe, Deborah Lee (deceased).

Recording artist, television performer, and star of 91 films. Founded western musical group the Sons of the Pioneers, 1930s; hired as singing-cowboy replacement for Gene Autry, 1936; first starring role, Under Western Stars, 1938; other films included Billy the Kid Returns, 1938, Red River Valley, 1941, Sons of the Pioneers, 1942, King of the Cowboys, 1943, The Cowboy and the Senorita, 1944, Hollywood Canteen, 1944, and Melody Time, 1948; recorded for Decca Records, late 1930s and 1940s; became top-grossing western star in Hollywood, 1943; starred in various network television series, 1951-65; recorded for Capitol and RCA Records, 1960s and 1970s; recorded Tribute album of duets, RCA, 1991.

Selected awards: Inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, 1988; member of the Cowboy Hall of Fame; National Film Society’s Humanitarian Award; Kiwanis Decency Award.

Addresses: Record company —RCA/BMG Music, One Music Circle N., Nashville, TN 37203-4310.

rural community where most music had to be self-made. He played the guitar and mandolin, sang in a church choir, and called square dances. On the farm he learned to handle a horse, but to ride one at full tilt was a skill he acquired only in Hollywood. Much of his time was spent on farm chores; in school he recalled being “pretty good at sports, not bad at the clarinet, okay with my studies, and a galloping failure with the girls.” When Leonard was 17, the family moved back to Cincinnati. Leonard joined his father at the shoe factory and dropped out of high school shortly thereafter.

When the chance came to escape hard times and dead-end work by joining a relative in California, nobody in the family needed much persuading. In the spring of 1930 the Slyes embarked on the voyage made by many other American families. But at the end of the rainbow lay no pot of gold, only long months of driving a gravel truck for Leonard and migratory fruit picking for the whole clan. When the former gravel truck driver later read The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s classic tale of Dust Bowl migrants, his comment was this: “There are parts in that book that made me wonder if maybe Mr. Steinbeck wasn’t looking over the shoulders of the Slye family.”

Breaking Into Western Music

Leonard Slye was known among the migrant families he encountered as a fine impromptu guitarist, singer, and square dance caller. Soon he teamed with a cousin; the pair billed themselves as the Slye Brothers and began to play for parties and dances, earning what they could by passing the hat. Probably they believed that at the height of the Depression, music offered as reasonable a chance at a decent living as any other work did. The duo was short-lived, but soon Leonard, goaded on by his sister Mary, entered a talent contest presented on a small radio station in Inglewood, California. He did not win, but he did attract the attention of the promoter of a western music group, the Rocky Mountaineers, and was invited to join the group. This act was not especially successful, either—the performer later recalled that in the rainy spring its members would tour the canyons above Los Angeles, hoping to come upon cars stuck in the mud and be generously tipped for helping to push them out. But the group attracted two prolific and original songwriters, Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer, and the nucleus of what would become the Sons of the Pioneers was formed.

Before that group’s debut, though, Leonard embarked in 1933 on an ill-planned tour of the Southwest with the O-Bar-O Cowboys, a group that also included Tim Spencer. This group, subsisting at times on a diet of rabbit and hawk that they procured with a borrowed rifle, turned to a time-honored trick among destitute radio performers: mentioning food on the air in the hope that a musically impressed and kindhearted listener might take the hint. During an otherwise unprofitable radio appearance in Roswell, New Mexico, Leonard fulfilled a request for the “Swiss Yodel” in exchange for a lemon pie from a girl named Arlene Wilkins. The two were married in 1936; the singer has said it was “love at first sight.”

The O-Bar-0 Cowboys sputtered to their demise in Lubbock, Texas, “so broke,” Rogers later said, “we couldn’t pay attention.” Back in Hollywood, he worked briefly with another radio western outfit, the Texas Outlaws. But he continued to dream of breaking through to stardom. Sensing the talents of Nolan and Spencer, he persuaded them to give up their day jobs and join him in serious rehearsals for an act to be called the Pioneer Trio. The name was changed to the Sons of the Pioneers after a radio announcer botched an introduction. Historian Douglas Green (leader of the present day Sons of the Pioneers imitators Riders in the Sky) called Rogers the group’s “sparkplug.”

His part in creating the Sons of the Pioneers remains Rogers greatest purely musical accomplishment. With the addition to the group of two swing-playing Texas brothers, Hugh and Karl Farr, the Sons of the Pioneers offered a combination of beautifully wrought, poetic lyrics (Nolan was a serious student of the classics of English poetry), perfect trio and quartet harmonies, Rogers’s yodeling, and crack instrumental playing that set the standard for western music for years to come. The group, with various changes in personnel (Rogers left when he achieved film stardom), endured for more than half a century, and such pieces as “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” remain country classics.

Into the Movies

By 1935 the group was working steadily and often provided background music for western films. This work led to a series of bit parts for Rogers, who billed himself as Dick Weston for a time. The following year, Gene Autry became embroiled in a contract dispute with Republic Pictures, and Rogers, through a chance encounter in a hat shop, learned that Republic was auditioning replacements. He rushed to the scene, sneaked into the building, and became the studio’s new singing cowboy. His first starring role came in the 1938 film Under Western Stars. Studio executives gave Leonard Slye the name Roy Rogers, Rogers after the recently deceased humorist Will Rogers, and Roy for its alliterative quality. Rogers adopted his new name legally in 1942. The following year Rogers, by the luck of the lottery, escaped the military draft that claimed Autry and became the top-grossing cowboy star in Hollywood—the “King of the Cowboys.”

Studio publicity executives changed more of Rogers’s life than just his name. Life wrote of Rogers in 1943 that he “is playing a part not only during the hours he spends before the camera. He is under compulsion to play it almost 24 hours a day.” Rogers took naturally to his good-guy role. Collier’s reported that “there never are weeks in which some sobbing mother or pleading doctor doesn’t call Roy to come and see a desperately ill or dying child.” Rogers did his best to respond to such entreaties, and always set aside space for handicapped children at his personal appearances.

At the height of his career in the mid-1940s, Rogers was the object of unparalleled adulation among young people. Two thousand fan clubs were in operation in the United States, with more overseas. Western films have always attracted male audiences, but Rogers had many female followers as well; one fan magazine caused a momentary sensation when it queried its readers as to whether Rogers should break with cowboy-movie tradition and kiss his leading lady in his next screen outing. Traditionalists prevailed.

Rogers never gave the girl an onscreen kiss, but would often kiss his horse, Trigger, who, like Rogers, received great volumes of fan mail. The horse, purchased by Rogers himself from a rental stable near Los Angeles, eventually acquired a repertoire of more than 50 tricks, including doing simple arithmetic and signing an “X” with a pencil. “The World’s Smartest Horse” was featured prominently at Rogers’s many stage shows and personal appearances, which included an annual visit to the giant World’s Championship Rodeo at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Artificial as the singing-cowboy genre might have been, Rogers seemed believable as a cowboy and often took on an almost personal presence in the lives of his fans. One reason for this kind of identification was that Rogers usually appeared on film “as himself”—as a character named Roy Rogers. In a 1992 interview with Country Music magazine, Rogers pointed to this scriptwriting innovation as a contributor to his success: “Other actors played different characters, but I didn’t. It put my name before the public with the whole picture, in the form of a story.” In 1945 the New York Times reported that the volume of fan mail Rogers received had eclipsed all previous records. He has since traded on his good name and image by endorsing a large variety of commercial products and in recent years lending his name to a chain fast-food venture of which he is part-owner.

Rogers’s films, like Autry’s, were called B-Westerns—they were quickly turned out, relied on formulas, and were aimed at the vast audience that went to the movies weekly (or more often) and wanted simple new installments of its heroes’ adventures on a regular basis, much as television audiences do today. Rogers made 87 films for Republic Pictures between 1938 and 1951. In most of them, his rescue of a ranch family or small town would conclude neatly at sunset, and Rogers and Trigger would ride away into that sunset.

At various plot junctures a song might be featured, with Rogers accompanying himself on the guitar while muted strings hummed in the background. Songs along the trail were addressed to Trigger or to longtime sidekick Gabby Hayes. Most of the songs were contributed by composers employed by the film studios, but Rogers wrote some songs himself and his films continued to employ the talents of the Sons of the Pioneers. Sometimes, Rogers told Country Music, the music generated the movie: “We’d take a song like ’Don’t Fence Me In’ and write a story around it. That way, we’d get a lot of good publicity from the song and from the people who recorded the song.”

Remarriage and Personal Tragedy

The music always included a serenade directed at Rogers’s leading lady. From 1944 on, Rogers was paired with Dale Evans, whom he married in 1947 after the sudden death of his first wife. (It was Evans who composed “Happy Trails,” the tune with which Rogers is most closely associated. She wrote the song in 20 minutes as a theme song for a television program the pair inaugurated in 1951.) They have been professionally as well as personally teamed ever since. But tragedy continued to wind its dark counterpoint around Rogers’s success story. The only child born to Rogers and Evans, named Robin Elizabeth, died a victim of mongolism in 1953, and two children they adopted later died in freak accidents. Rogers and Evans sought solace in their Christian faith, and have gained some prominence as inspirational writers and lecturers.

In Rogers’s heyday, his recording career was always less important than his movie work. “Recording was my second or third priority,” he told Deborah Fruin of Country Fever. “Back in those days I was making seven or eight pictures a year. When I got a day off I’d do a personal appearance somewhere, Madison Square Garden or a state fair.” For a time, too, the best new musical material that Republic acquired was offered to Autry, a practice that caused some friction between the two men. Nevertheless, Newsweek reported in 1943 that Rogers’s 78 rpm singles on Decca Records were selling at the rate of 6,000 per week. His recordings alternated cowboy-movie fare with Texas-style vocal swing; he once offered a fine reading of Bob Wills’s “Time Changes Everything.” But Hollywood strings were heard more often in his music than Texas fiddles.

Rogers had carefully negotiated with Republic for the rights to his name, voice, and likeness, and when his second seven-year contract expired in 1951, he was able to make a lucrative move to television by preventing the studio (through a lengthy court battle) from distributing his previous films in edited versions for television presentation. Always in partnership with Evans, he was featured in a string of network western series and specials that were successful into the mid-1960s. Rogers also made a series of LP recordings for Capitol during the 1960s and early 1970s, but gradually his appearances in the spotlight dwindled to award presentations and occasional musical-program guest slots. He and Evans kept up a steady succession of evangelistic activities.

Rogers caught the public eye and ascended the country charts once more in late 1991, when RCA Records coaxed him out of retirement to record an album called Tribute. It featured Rogers singing duets with leading contemporary singers in the country field. Included were duets with such stars as Kathy Mattea, Randy Travis, K. T. Oslin, Alan Jackson, and Tanya Tucker. “I defy you to find any other 79-year-old man singing like that,” his producer said; Rogers even yodeled on several selections. The most successful collaboration was a duet with Clint Black called “Hold On Partner,” which was released as a single. Many people noticed the eerie physical resemblance between Rogers and the younger singer, and must have felt a sort of shock of recognition at how deeply Rogers’s image is implanted in the minds of most Americans. Some have noted that he seemed able, like some Hindu deity, to reincarnate himself.

Selected discography

Tribute (contains “Hold On Partner”), RCA, 1991.

Roy Rogers, MCA, 1992.

The Country Side of Roy Rogers, Capitol.

A Man From Duck Run, Capitol.

With the Sons of the Pioneers

Sons of the Pioneers (includes “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”), Columbia, 1982.

Sons of the Pioneers, MCA, 1991.

Sources

Books

Rogers, Roy, with Carlton Stowers, Happy Trails, Word Books, 1979.

Rothel, David, The Roy Rogers Book: A Reference-Trivia-Scrap-book, Empire, 1987.

Periodicals

Antiques & Collecting Hobbies, August 1992.

Billboard, September 21, 1991.

Collier’s, July 24, 1948.

Country Fever, August 1992.

Country Music, March/April 1992.

Journal of Country Music, May 1978.

Life, July 12, 1943.

Newsweek, March 8, 1943.

New York Times Magazine, November 4, 1945.

People, August 17, 1987.

Pulse!, November 1991.

Saturday Evening Post, June 9, 1945.

—James M. Manheim

Roy Rogers 1911–98, American Western film star, b. Cincinnati, Ohio, as Leonard Franklin Slye. The guitar-strumming Rogers succeeded Gene Autry as America's favorite singing cowboy in movies of the mid-1940s. An ex–fruit picker and cowpuncher, he and his brother performed on the radio during the 1930s. Rogers was a founder (1934) of the Sons of the Pioneers, a singing trio that began appearing in movies in 1935. His first starring role came three years later. In 1947, Rogers, by then the "king of the cowboys," married Dale Evans, 1912–2001, b. Uvalde, Tex., as Frances Octavia Smith. Together, they sang, rode, and acted in dozens of B movies, usually accompanied by their bearded sidekick George "Gabby" Hayes and Roy's palomino horse Trigger. The couple also starred (1951–57) in television's Roy Rogers Show and hosted (1962–63) a variety program. The Roy Rogers–Dale Evans Museum, which displays their memorabilia, is in Branson, Mo.

Bibliography: See R. Rogers and D. Evans, Happy Trails (1979, repr. 1995); biography by R. W. Phillips (1995); D. Rothel, The Roy Rogers Book (1987).