Wild and woolly cowboy myths

Singing in the Saddle

The History of the Singing Cowboy

Douglas B. Green

Vanderbilt University Press /

Country Music Foundation Press: 392 pp., $34.95

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Cowboy

How Hollywood Invented the Wild West

Holly George-Warren

Reader’s Digest: 224 pp., $32.95

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Rodeo Queens and

the American Dream

Joan Burbick

PublicAffairs: 256 pp., $26

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The late Gene Autry may be best remembered nowadays as a baseball and broadcasting mogul, but his reputation -- and his fortune -- began all the way back in 1934 with the release of “In Old Santa Fe,” a landmark motion picture that dressed up the stock character of the “singing cowboy” in gaudy apparel and showed cowhands riding in roadsters as well as the saddle. The movie, as we discover in “Singing in the Saddle” by Douglas B. Green, not only launched Autry’s screen career but also literally invented the now-familiar figure of the Rhinestone Cowboy.

“Western purists often vilified the approach as ludicrous,” explains Green, “but it proved popular with the public, who apparently enjoyed watching their heroes portraying radio stars or touring entertainers who happened to foil evildoers in their spare time, rode powerful, intelligent horses, and formed posses composed of guitarists, fiddlers, and harmony singers.”

Green knows whereof he speaks (he has performed over the last quarter of a century as “Ranger Doug” in the musical ensemble called Riders in the Sky). And he brings both savvy and wry good humor to “Singing in the Saddle,” a scholarly but lively account of the singing cowboy as both a show-business phenomenon and an icon of American popular culture.

Reaching all the way back to James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo -- “the first hero of what we might call western fiction” -- and bringing his readers up to date on what he insists is a latter-day revival of cowboy music, Green is always mindful of how the cowboy myth “cuts straight to our deepest fantasies, heedless of reality and fact,” and he always reveals exactly how the images were created and manipulated by some of the canniest and most calculating figures in the entertainment industry.

Thus, for example, he credits a New York movie producer named Nat Levine for the innovations that distinguish “In Old Santa Fe” as history-making western, including the invention of Gene Autry as a cowboy star (it was Levine who discovered the young radio performer, signed him to a contract and promptly sent him off to take riding lessons). Among the other cowboy stars whom Levine presented to the world were such luminaries as Ken Maynard, Tom Mix and John Wayne, but it is characteristic of Green that he refrains from over-praising Levine’s role in cowboy myth-making.

“There is no evidence that he cared particularly for cowboy, folk, or country music,” Green writes about Levine. “[W]hat he did care for was black ink on the bottom line.”

Some of the stars who figure in “Singing in the Saddle” are also on display in “Cowboy” by Holly George-Warren, a colorful and expertly annotated scrapbook of vintage photographs, publicity stills, movie posters and other memorabilia that shows exactly how the real cowboys of the American frontier were translated into the imaginary ones we see on the silver screen.

As early as 1911, the author points out, a motion picture trade paper was dismissing the western as “a gold mine that had been worked to the limit.” Yet John Ford, whose first western was a two-reeler released in 1917, continued to turn out classics for half a century. And George-Warren allows us to see Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” (1992) as not only a masterpiece of the genre but also as an ironic homage to the spaghetti westerns that rescued his faltering career some 30 years earlier and, arguably, the greatest performance of his long career in cowboy roles.

“Cowboy” offers some surprising glimpses of what might seem like familiar terrain. During the 1930s, for example, Herbert Jeffries, a jazz vocalist at the Club Alabam in Los Angeles, was recruited to star as a singing cowboy in a series of all-black musical westerns that debuted with “Harlem on the Prairie.” And she reminds us that women, who were represented among the real-life cowpunchers and sharpshooters of the Old West, were not overlooked in the movie versions; Barbara Stanwyck, the iconic hard-boiled dame of film noir, started her career in the mid-1930s in the role of Annie Oakley and returned to the Old West as the matriarch of a San Joaquin Valley ranch on “The Big Valley” in the late ‘60s.

The rodeo is yet another genre of western entertainment, one that reenacts the cowboy myth in its purest and most potent form. “Today, the West is a tenacious symbol of power and freedom,” Joan Burbick explains in “Rodeo Queens and the American Dream,” “and the rodeo plays out that symbolism in ritual and sport.”

The “rodeo queens” whom Burbick profiles play a glamorous but conflicted role in the rodeo subculture; they are “cowboy cheerleaders” whose role is to “get the blood pumping” for the cowboys who are the real stars of the show. For some of these women, the rodeo represents an escape from the tedium, isolation and hard work of ranching. For others, it was the closest they would ever come to show business. For a few, it was an elevating experience, an induction to a kind of cowboy aristocracy. “It was about the highest thing I ever did,” says one former queen, “besides get married.”

Burbick, a professor of American studies at Washington State University, is far more eloquent than the women whose lives she is exploring. As a result, it is her voice that we hear in these pages, rather than the voices of the women she profiles. Still, she succeeds in articulating their ambitions and their anxieties, as well as her own insights, and she is capable of showing us both the glitter and glamour of the rodeo subculture and, at the same time, some of its deepest contradictions.

Rodeo sponsors, for example, claim to showcase the skills that were once required for ranching. But Burbick introduces us to a woman named Blanche, a rodeo queen from the 1940s, who regards the showiest moments in the rodeo, when a cowboy mounts a bucking bronco, as not merely phony but morally objectionable. Horsemanship on the ranch is a matter of building trust between horse and rider, but the opposite is true at the rodeo, where a strap is attached to the flanks of the horse, as Burbick explains, to spook the horse and encourage it to buck.

“To Blanche, the strap symbolized the betrayal of the relationship between man and horse,” Burbick writes. “At some basic level, the rodeo ruined the relationship humans can have with the horse.”

Each one of these three books makes something of the same point, if sometimes only inadvertently. Cowboy music, cowboy movies and the cowboy antics of the rodeo are all rooted in a notion of the American frontier that we are taught to cherish: The Old West was a wilderness where the skill, courage and self-reliance of the individual were matters of life and death. Each of these three genres of entertainment purports to celebrate that idea, and yet each one is really only make-believe, sometimes elevating the West to mythic stature but more often reducing it to a sad and sorry caricature.