Autry, Gene
Gene Autry
Singer, guitarist, actor
The Right Man at the Right Time
The Singing Cowboy and His Music
The life of Gene Autry reads like a chapter from the American Dream. Rising from classically obscure roots on a Texas ranch, Autry became the personification of “The Singing Cowboy” as well as one of the most financially successful entertainers of this century. In addition to being the Number One country music star of the 1930s, Autry numbered among the Top Ten popular actors from 1940 to 1942, eclipsing film legends Tyrone Power, James Cagney, Judy Garland, and Bette Davis in box-office appeal.
During his career, Autry sold more than 50 million recordings—1949’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” sold 25 million copies alone. In addition, Autry authored over 250 songs, including “Tears on My Pillow,” the 1939 classic that he co-wrote with Ray Whitley, “Back in the Saddle,” “Buttons and Bows,” and the Christmas classic “Here Comes Santa Claus.” While remaining relatively unknown in larger cities, Autry gained phenomenal popularity in hundreds of small towns throughout the West and Southwest.
His good looks, singing ability, and charisma helped to popularize the Western elements in country music, lending romance and dignity to a musical genre that had once only identified with Appalachian “hillbillies.” As a star, Autry took seriously his influence upon the legions of young boys who formed Gene Autry clubs and strove to live according to Gene’s “Cowboy’s Code” of the Western hero.
Autry was born on a ranch outside of Tioga, Texas, but moved to Ravia, Oklahoma, where he spent the greater part of his childhood. In addition to the hard work of ranch life, music played a significant role in his upbringing: Autry was taught to sing at age five so he could join the choir of his grandfather’s Baptist church. Hismother supplemented her son’s vocal ability with guitar lessons.
The Right Man at the Right Time
Although Autry dreamed of becoming a baseball player, he discovered that his singing could earn him money. As a teenager, he toured for three months as a ballad singer with the Fields Brothers Marvelous Medicine Show. But at 15, the hardworking and pragmatic Autry put his musical talent aside to work at the railroad telegraph station in nearby Chelsea, Oklahoma, to help support his family.
Autry passed long hours working the graveyard shift at the small telegraph office by singing and playing guitar. He strummed familiar cowboy tunes and worked at emulating the sounds of his musical hero, Jimmie Rodgers. Known popularly as “The Singing Brakeman,”
For the Record…
Born Orvon Gene Autry, September 29, 1907, in Tioga, TX; son of Delbert (a livestock dealer) and Elnora (Ozment) Autry; married Ina Mae Spivey, 1932 (died, 1980); married Jacqueline Ellam, 1981.
Worked as a freight handler and roustabout, St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad, Chelsea, OK, 1922, and became telegrapher, 1925; sang on local radio show, beginning in 1928; signed with Victor Records, 1929; signed with American Record Corp. and performed on WLS Barndance, beginning in 1931; first film appearance, 1934; signed with Republic Studios, 1935; signed with Columbia Pictures, 1947; formed Gene Autry Productions, 1947; formed Flying A Productions (television production company), 1950; began as organizer and became co-owner, California Angels (formerly Los Angeles Angels) baseball team, 1960—; opened Gene Autry Heritage Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 1988. Film appearances include In Ole Santa Fe, 1934; The Phantom Empire, Melody Trail, Sagebrush Troubadour, and Singing Vagabond, all 1935; Boots and Saddles, 1937; Shooting High, Back in the Saddle, and Melody Ranch, all 1941; The Last Roundup, 1947; and Last of the Pony Riders, 1953. Military service: U.S. Air Force, 1942-45.
Awards: Inducted into Country Music Hall of Fame, Country Music Association, 1969; inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame, National Association of Broadcasters, 1977; D. W. Griffith Career Award, 1991; Lifetime Achievement Award, Songwriter’s Hall Of Fame, 1991; inducted into Broadcast and Cable Hall of Fame, 1993; Horatio Alger Award, Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.
Addresses: Office —Golden West Broadcasters, 5858 West Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, CA 90028; P.O. Box 710, Los Angeles, CA 90078.
Rodgers’s famous yodeling style was itself the result of long hours spent in a railroad telegraph office imitating the plaintive moan of a train whistle.
As it so often happens in music legend, chance sends an influential stranger in the direction of an unknown but talented young person. One night in 1926, a traveler stopped in Chelsea to send a wire. The man who walked into the St. Louis & Frisco telegraph office was the famous American folk humorist Will Rogers. Rogers sat down and listened to the telegraph operator, who, unaware of a customer, was immersed in a song. After Autry strummed his final chord, Rogers stepped forward and complimented the young man, encouraging him to go and try his luck in New York City.
Rogers’s praise didn’t convince Autry to jump aboard the first train headed East. Leaving a secure job during hard economic times would be foolish. But encouragement from a man of Rogers’s stature made Autry seriously consider a musical career. About a year after Rogers paid his visit, Autry used a free rail pass to board a train for New York.
In the city, Autry was fortunate to link up with Johnny and Frankie Marvin, two fellow Oklahomans who had met with success in radio and recordings. After listening to the young singer, they offered encouragement but recommended that he get more performing experience. Autry returned to Oklahoma full of confidence that he could be a success. He got a job as “Oklahoma’s Yodeling Cowboy” on a Tulsa radio station and wrote several songs with his boss, train-dispatcher Jimmie Long. One of these, “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine,” gained Autry a write-up in the local paper and a good amount of regional exposure. A1935 recording of the tune would eventually become Autry’s first gold record.
Hollywood: The Phantom Empire
With six months of experience on Oklahoma radio behind him, Autry returned to New York where the Marvin boys landed him a recording contract with Victor in the fall of 1929. His ability to imitate the popular Jimmie Rodgers style sparked the interest of several other record companies: Autry would record with such labels as Grey Gull, Gennett, and Velvet Tone during his time in New York.
After two years of mimicking Rodgers, Autry was eager to branch out into his own singing style. He signed on with the American Record Corporation in 1931 and joined WLS Radio’s National Bam Dance, at that time inarguably the most popular country radio show in the nation. Mail-order giant Sears, Roebuck & Company, the owner of WLS (the call-letters stood for “World’s Largest Store”), wasted no time in marketing Autry’s popularity. Gene Autry Special Round-Up guitars were featured in the pages of the Sears catalog along with Gene Autry songbooks. An entire section was devoted to Gene Autry recordings.
WLS even gave Autry his own radio show, Conqueror Record Time, to promote Autry’s recordings on the Sears-owned Conqueror record label. Despite the Depression, by 1934, “Oklahoma’s Singing Cowboy” was one of the most well-known recording artists in America.
During the Depression, Hollywood’s film industry became a shield against the economic worries of many Americans. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced amid opulent settings in lighthearted romantic comedies, Tarzan swung across many a hometown movie screen, and stars such as Errol Flynn and the beautiful Olivia de Havilland drew willing audiences into the past in escapist costume dramas.
Likewise, Western films provided a means of escape. As Hollywood looked for new ways to promote its steady crop of willing cowboy actors, the “horse opera” was born. The first Western with musical highlights was a 1930 film starring Ken Maynard. Autry was persuaded to try his hand at acting four years later when his appearance beside Maynard in Republic Studios’ In Ole Santa Fe engaged film audiences. The Singing Cowboy was suddenly more than just a pleasant voice—now he had a face.
Autry’s popularity prompted Republic to cast him in a 13-chapter Western/sci-fi serial called The Phantom Empire. This quirky cliffhanger was such a success with audiences that by 1935 Autry was hard at work on Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds, the first of many two-reelers that would make his name a household word. Less than a month later, Autry’s name appeared at theaters around the country in association with another film, Melody Trail, in which his horse, Champion, was introduced to eager film audiences.
Following a tried-and-true formula, Autry’s films were set on a Western landscape replete with automobiles, airplanes, and avaricious businessmen, the modern-day version of cattle-rustlers. Each hour-long film would allow its star the opportunity to break into song an average of six times. As the Number One western box-office star from 1937 into the 1940s, Autry helped define the B Western. Helped only by his humorous sidekick and trusty horse, Autry would save the oppressed from the evil menace while always following the Cowboy’s Code: Never shoot first, never hit a man smaller than yourself, and never go back on your word.
Altogether, Autry would star in over 90 films, as well as in Melody Ranch, a radio series whose theme song, “Back in the Saddle,” would be heard by American families for over 17 years. While Roy Rogers would finally rise to become America’s favorite Western star in 1947, Autry would remain a close second in popularity until his semi-retirement from show business in 1957 at the age of 50.
The Singing Cowboy and His Music
Musically, Autry’s style began as a derivative of that of Jimmie Rodgers. Indeed, Rodgers was a great influence on many of the country artists of the 1920s and 1930s—Jimmie Davis, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, and Merle Haggard were only some of the musicians inspired by Rodgers’s “blue yodels” and sentimental balladry. The sparse backup of Autry’s early works—“The Yellow Rose of Texas,” with harmony by Jimmie Long, and “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds,” with vocal backup by Long and movie sidekick Smiley Burnette—gave way to more Western swing-based arrangements when Gene hired Indiana jazz violinist Carl Cotner in 1937.
Cotner was responsible for much of the “Autry sound” from the late 1930s into the 1940s with arrangements using violins, steel guitar, and an occasional horn. In his 1979 autobiography, Back in the Saddle Again, Autry described a typical working session. “I would stop in the middle of a song and say, ‘Right there, that’s the place. We need ... Carl, you know what it is. We ought to put it in right there.’ And Carl wouldn’t know. He would fiddle around until he stumbled onto what I wanted ... until my ear told me it was right. In time,” noted Autry, “after years of working closely, and Carl having to read my mind, he developed an instinct for it.”
As Bill C. Malone commented in Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, “Autry had a repertory, like most country entertainers of the era, that lacked clear definition.” His interest in pop music motivated him to record a number of popular songs originally recorded by top bandleaders of the day. Amid hits such as “Hillbilly Wedding in June” and “Empty Cot in the Bunk House” appeared a rendition of Kay Kyser’s “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle”; “Blueberry Hill,” first recorded by Glen Miller, became a Gene Autry hit in 1940.
The pop approach of the Autry-Cotner team made Autry one of the first “crossover” country stars and invited country music in the front door of middle-class homes from Boisie to Boston. His popularization of country music provided a leg-up for the many talented musicians who would perform with him over the years. Unlike Cotner, many of these, including Burnette, Johnny Bond, Merle Travis, Whitey Ford, Jimmy Wakely, Pat Buttram, and the Cass County Boys, came from so-called hillbilly backgrounds.
Even with Autry’s astounding popularity, as Douglas Green noted in Journal of Country Music, Autry’s career has been a paradoxical one. The star’s desire to look ahead has been accompanied by a lack of desire to reflect upon his early years. “Gene Autry’s career is surely one of the half dozen most important in country music,” wrote Green, “yet we really know little about it.... We know nothing of the inspiration that first fired his interest in music, the music which directed his talent... or the forces which shaped his music.” In public perception, Autry the legend has obscured Autry the man.
The Sunset of the B Western
After a musical career spanning over 40 years, Autry went on to become involved in other areas of the entertainment industry. A savvy investor since purchasing his first radio station prior to joining the Air Force during World War II, Autry had the foresight to see potential in the new medium of television. At one point, Autry was the owner of over ten radio and television stations, as well as president of Flying A Productions, a company that produced such television series as Range Rider and The Adventures of Champion. In sports circles, much of Autry’s fame as a singing cowboy has been overshadowed by his high profile as co-organizer and owner of the California Angels baseball team.
“It occurs to me that music, with the possible exception of riding a bull, is the most uncertain way to make a living I know,” Autry stated in his autobiography. “In either case, you can get bucked off, thrown, stepped on, trampled—if you get on at all. At best, it is a short and bumpy ride. It isn’t easy to explain why you keep coming back, but you do.” Autry’s willingness to work hard and take risks brought him much farther than that “short and bumpy ride.” And the personality he projected on both screen and radio—the openness and honesty he epitomized—made Autry the embodiment of “The Singing Cowboy,” a cultural icon that sustained Americans, young and old alike, through the lean years of the Depression and beyond.
Selected discography
Greatest Hits (contains “You Are My Sunshine,” “Lonely River,” and “Blues Stay Away from Me”), Columbia, 1961.
Golden Hits, RCA Victor, 1962.
Great Hits, Harmony, 1965.
The Essential Gene Autry (contains “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Back in the Saddle Again”), Columbia, 1992.
Sources
Books
Autry, Gene, with Mickey Herskowitz, Back in the Saddle Again, Doubleday, 1978.
Biracree, Tom, The Country Music Almanac, Prentice Hall, 1993.
Malone, Bill C, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music, University of Georgia Press, 1993.
Miller, LeeO., Great Cowboy Stars of Movies and Television, Arlington House, 1979.
Periodicals
Country America, March 1994.
Country Song Roundup, February 1994.
Journal of Country Music, vol. 7, no. 2; vol. 7, no. 3.
Additional information for this profile was obtained from Charles Wolfe’s liner notes to the Columbia reissue The Essential Gene Autry, 1933-1946, February 1992.
—Pamela Shelton
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Autry, Gene