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Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy, Peter Stanfield. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy. Douglas B. Green. Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 2002.
"Westerns are history!" The death-knell for cowboy films has sounded many times, but the Western has proven phoenix-like in its ability to rise from the ashes and reinvent itself for new audiences. At no time was this truer than during the early 1930s. Commentators were suggesting that Westerns were finished: with their emphasis on shoot-'em-up action rather than dramatic dialogue, they would not transition well from silents to sound. But critics reckoned without the Singing Cowboys, balladeer heroes who rescued a genre in distress.
Within a few years, eager audiences were consuming hundreds of Singing Cowboy films annually, and Gene Autry and Roy Rogers became household names. With their flashy costumes, good looks, wholesome ways, and problem-solving abilities, Singing Cowboys had become heroes. Their movies typically included smart horses, comic sidekicks, pretty (but not to be kissed) girls, absurd escapist plots, and lots of music. The whole made for an irresistible package that captured the hearts of rural and working-class America.
Scholarly studies of the Singing Cowboys have been few and far between. It is refreshing, then, to see two university press publications appear on the topic in the same year. Douglas B. Green is better known to many as Ranger Doug, founder of Riders in the Sky, the premier Western musical group of the modern era. Green, a...