This Week in Texas Music History, we get back in the saddle again with the original singing cowboy.
On September 29, 1907, Gene Autry was born in Tioga, Texas, son of rancher Delbert Autry. Like many North Texans, his early story crossed back and forth over the Oklahoma border, where he played guitar and sang while working as a telegraph operator for the railroads. The way Autry told it, it was on one of those shifts, in 1927, when humorist Will Rogers heard him singing and encouraged him to work in radio, leading to a job on Tulsa’s KVOO.
A record deal followed in 1929, and his first hit single, “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine,” came in 1931. If Will Rogers kicked off Autry’s career, it was another Rodgers, country star Jimmie, who Autry modeled himself after in these early years.
Next, Autry turned his attention to Hollywood, and in 1934 played a role in the Ken Maynard western In Old Santa Fe, a pioneering film in the “singing cowboy” genre. The filmmakers noted that the Texan Autry acted more naturally on horseback than the movie’s star, and he booked a feature of his own, the surreal sci-fi western Phantom Empire, in 1935.
Autry would go on to star in nearly sixty western films over the next two decades. Alongside other marquee singing cowboys such as Tex Ritter and Roy Rogers, Autry canonized old cowhand tunes, say, “Home on the Range,” and popularized new standards like “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” All that, and Autry created his own television show, broke sales records with a little 1949 ditty called “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and in 1960 purchased the Los Angeles Angels baseball team.
His legacy continues in the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, a testament to the art, culture, and history of a region Gene Autry’s career celebrated, and which had shaped him from North Texas ranches to Oklahoma railroads to the magic of Hollywood film.
Sources:
Jarad Brown in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
Holly George-Warren. Public Cowboy no.1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Douglas Green. Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.
Ron Briley, “Gene Autry and the Phantom Empire: The Cowboy in the Wired West of the Future,” Journal of Texas Music History 10 (2010).
Media:
Gene Autry, “Back in the Saddle Again”
Gene Autry, “Deep in the Heart of Texas”
Gene Autry, Phantom Empire Serial
Autry Museum of the American West
