This Week in Texas Music History, we hit the happy trails with Uvalde’s “Queen of the Cowgirls.”
Episodes written by Jason Mellard, Alan Schaefer, and Avery Armstrong
On October 31, 1912, western singer Dale Evans was born in Uvalde, Texas. She left the state as a child and began working in show business in Memphis, but Texas and its iconography would soon call her home. In 1936, she landed in Dallas as a popular singer on radio station WFAA. From that point, Evans worked steadily in film and radio, but her enormous fame arrived in 1943, when she united with the “King of the Cowboys,” western singer and actor Roy Rogers.
By the end of 1944 the pair had already made five films, including The Yellow Rose of Texas. By the time The Roy Rogers Show with Dale Evans began its seven-year televised run in 1951, Evans and Rogers had appeared together in 29 films. They became one of the all-time most popular husband-and-wife duos in American entertainment. And Evans wrote her own material, too, penning the couple’s iconic theme song, “Happy Trails,” along with several gospel and country standards. In 1952 Evans even had her own comic book series published by DC, Queen of the Westerns: Dale Evans Comics Featuring the Kangaroo Cowboy.
Evans and Rogers’s popularity began to wane in the 1960s, but Evans busied herself with writing inspirational and faith-based books and maintaining the family’s brand. She received many honors in her career: a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, induction into the Western Music Association in 1989, and entry into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth in 1995. Evans passed in 2001 and was buried next to Roy Rogers in Apple Valley, California, leaving a legacy as happy as the trails she blazed.
