A West That Wasn’t : Roundup Time for Singing Cowboys

There has never been an American myth quite like the singing cowboy.

An invention of pre-World War II B-movie makers toying with talkies, the singing cowboy--Ken Maynard, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, for example--took care of business with determination and sure aim and often with nasal tones. He was a pure celluloid invention, a hero figure who eventually and astonishingly influenced style, language and some parts of our musical entertainment for most of this century.

This cowboy sang of prairies, ponies and partners. He bonded primarily with prairies, ponies and partners.

He stood tall under his Stetson, in and out of saddle, and always with his woman.

Don’t, please, ever fence him in. Just let him straddle his old saddle under Western skies above.

But he is getting fenced in, institutionalized while being celebrated this week, just over the horizon from Hollywood’s Gower Gulch and down the road from the old Republic lot in Studio City. The folks at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park have put together a three-day roundup honoring singing cowboys and Western music of then and now. It starts Friday and runs until almost sundown Sunday.

Monte Hale, Rex Allen, Eddie Dean, Rogers and Autry, of course, will be there. So, too, Dale Evans and Patsy Montana.

And a singing cowboy better known for flamingos than flesh on the hoof, Herb Jeffries, in such once-upon-a-time Westerns as the “Bronze Buckaroo,” the “Two-Gun Man From Harlem.”

In the ‘20s and ‘30s, a time when Hollywood studios kept reinventing a West that never was with cowboys who could croon, Jeffries, a big-band singer with Earl (Fatha) Hines, became a distinctive Hollywood presence.

Jeffries could sing.

Jeffries was black.

At 80, still performing, Jeffries just completed a string of 39 one-night concerts and club appearances. He lives near horse country in Woodland Hills. He’s looking forward to finally meeting the other singing cowboys, especially pleased about this Autry museum event.

“Somebody writes you’re a living legend and the telephone starts ringing,” he says. “That’s great. I just went to a memorial service for an old friend who died and I never saw such a big turnout. They raised a lot of money for his family. It’s always that same kind of story. As far as I’m concerned, do a memorial for me when I’m alive. When I’m dead who the hell needs it? You can keep the flowers. Let me smell them when I’m alive.”

The voice is strong. The face clearly belies his recent 80th birthday.

His story of life on the Hollywood filmmaking range is unique, a reminder of how a Hollywood formula influenced several generations of Americans and a measure of where our society has gone.

Jeffries grew up in Detroit untouched by discrimination, he says. Touring as a young man with the Hines band in the South, he experienced discrimination for the first time, in housing and in theaters. But, whether in tin-roof shack movie houses or in upstairs “peanut galleries,” the films were about whites. Westerns, especially the musicals, fascinated him.

Why not, he thought, Western movies about blacks? There had been black cowboys, wagon trail drivers, scouts, cattle drovers, freed slaves who had joined up with American Indian tribes and learned horse-riding skills.

He tried unsuccessfully to raise money to make his movie Westerns. Finally in Los Angeles he discovered Gower Gulch, that portion of Hollywood around Sunset and Gower where many independent film companies were mass producing B movies and Westerns. There he convinced independent studio owner Jed Buell that those thousands of small shacks across the South could be a new, profit-making market.

The result: “Harlem on the Prairie,” starring Jeffries in what he calls the first all-black musical Western, shot in 10 days around Victorville and Saugus. Because of press attention, the movie found an audience outside of the South, playing at one time at New York’s Rialto Theater.

The movie also attracted interest in Jeffries as an actor. Richard Kahn of Hollywood Productions lured him away with a higher salary and promises of other black musical Westerns. “Two-Gun Man From Harlem” came quickly next.

“In those days,” Jeffries says, “whites used the word Harlem to identify with blacks, Negroes then. So after the second movie I talked Kahn into trying something else, not to use the word Harlem. So we settled on ‘Bronze Buckaroo.’ Maybe that didn’t work as well because our next movie was ‘Harlem Rides the Range.’

“I started out using the movie name Kincaid for the lead in ‘Harlem on the Prairie,’ then I became Bob Blake. The stories were always pretty much the same. They were just like the white Westerns. The family mine was being foreclosed. There was a fight over water rights. A pretty girl had been kidnaped. For the most part we used plots from old scripts from white movies and just changed names. The actors were black and the crews were always white. Blacks couldn’t get into the unions or into much of anything. There were some black filmmakers with minimal equipment, but we were the only ones for a while making Westerns with all-black casts.”

Jeffries made five singing-cowboy movies. Three exist in video versions. Most of the original celluloid has deteriorated, with some footage salvaged.

Because filmmaking required little of his time, Jeffries returned to singing between roles, joining the Duke Ellington band. “The movies popularized me, for black and white audiences. I made more money on personal appearances than I did acting.”

He moved away from Westerns. His hit record “Flamingo” established him as a popular vocalist. The Air Force in World War II took him from Hollywood, but he would return later for a number of movie roles. In “Calypso Joe” he starred with newcomer Angie Dickinson. His career as a singing cowboy had found new trails.

“I never met the white cowboys then,” he says of his moviemaking experiences. “We admired what they did and followed their stories. No one smoked. No bad language was used, not even the bad guys. Sure we shot at the villains, but you never saw blood being splattered all over the place. You’d see a bad guy, you’d hear the shot and he’d fall from his horse. Our films were directed to the youth of America. We were trying to be examples.

“In my time, I’ve seen unbelievable changes in this country. In 1935, me and the band were escorted out of Charlotte, N.C., by the sheriff. Three years ago I was invited back for a movie reunion. The newspapers there had headlines about ‘He Brought Black Cowboys to All-White Westerns’ and ‘He Slaps on Microphone Faster Than a Pistol.’

“We made entertainment. We have always been ambassadors of goodwill. We didn’t deliver political messages.”

But he doesn’t back away from messages now. “Our recent problems in Los Angeles aren’t just ethnic. Any man who finds himself destitute and his children don’t have food will find a way to get what he needs. Nobody wants to starve to death.”

Autry Museum Honors Singing Cowboys

“Music of the West: A Tribute to the Singing Cowboys,” a three-day festival at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum beginning Friday, will feature current and veteran Western groups, musical (fiddle, guitar, yodeling and song-writing) workshops, and panel discussions from cowboy poetry to song marketing. Film screenings and discussions will be led by John Langellier, director of research and publications at the museum.

At the Saturday night concert, country artists Emmylou Harris, Clint Black and Dwight Yoakam along with actors Dennis Weaver, Lee Horsley, Richard Farnsworth, Jane Withers and Buddy Ebsen will honor the remaining and remembered singing cowboys.

Information: (213) 667-2000.