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Overview
Best known to Americans as the “singing cowboy,” beloved entertainer Gene Autry (1907–1998) appeared in countless films, radio broadcasts, television shows, and other venues. While Autry’s name and a few of his hit songs are still widely known today, his commitment to political causes and public diplomacy deserves greater appreciation. In this innovative examination of Autry’s influence on public opinion, Michael Duchemin explores the various platforms this cowboy crooner used to support important causes, notably Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and foreign policy initiatives leading up to World War II. As a prolific performer of western folk songs and country-western music, Autry gained popularity in the 1930s by developing a persona that appealed to rural, small-town, and newly urban fans. It was during this same time, Duchemin explains, that Autry threw his support behind the thirty-second president of the United States. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Duchemin demonstrates how Autry popularized Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and made them more attractive to the American public. In turn, the president used the emerging motion picture industry as an instrument of public diplomacy to enhance his policy agendas, which Autry’s films, backed by Republic Pictures, unabashedly endorsed. As the United States inched toward entry into World War II, the president’s focus shifted toward foreign policy. Autry responded by promoting Americanism, war preparedness, and friendly relations with Latin America. As a result, Duchemin argues, “Sergeant Gene Autry” played a unique role in making FDR’s internationalist policies more palatable for American citizens reluctant to engage in another foreign war.New Deal Cowboy enhances our understanding of Gene Autry as a western folk hero who, during critical times of economic recovery and international crisis, readily assumed the role of public diplomat, skillfully using his talents to persuade a marginalized populace to embrace a nationalist agenda. By drawing connections between western popular culture and American political history, the book also offers valuable insight concerning the development of leisure and western tourism, the information industry, public diplomacy, and foreign policy in twentieth-century America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806153926 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 09/22/2016 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Sales rank: | 520,768 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Michael Duchemin is Executive Director of the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana, and has also served as curator with the Autry National Center in Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
New Deal Cowboy
Gene Autry and Public Diplomacy
By Michael Duchemin
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5392-6
CHAPTER 1
Country-Western Hybrid Music
Gene Autry's reputation as a lowbrow entertainer dates back to the beginning of his career as a singer-songwriter. Autry got his start in 1929, recording knockoffs of Jimmie Rodgers's blue yodels to sell at discount prices through mail-order catalogs and other low-cost retailers. He moonlighted while working as a telegrapher for the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad (the Frisco line). Making good money from the sale of records like "Hobo Yodel" (1930) and "A Yodeling Hobo" (1931), Autry promoted himself as "The Sunny South's Blue Yodeler." Working alone or in tandem with Jimmy Long, the two railroad men–turned–singer-songwriters modeled their performances after "The Singing Brakeman." Beside Rodgers and Long, Autry's other musical influences included Vernon Dalhart and Gene Austin.
Autry and Long scored their first big hit for the American Record Corporation (ARC). Recorded on October 29, 1931, "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" charted as Autry's 142nd recording. Art Satherley produced "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine," putting "Mississippi Valley Blues" on the flipside. ARC's head of artists and repertoire (A&R), Satherley marketed the song nationally using twelve different record labels and collecting half of the music royalties for each record sold. Autry and Long split the remainder, each of them earning 25 percent. Similarly, Satherley and Autry split the royalties 50–50 for two big-selling Victor recordings, "Jailhouse Blues" and "I'm Atlanta Bound," recorded a few days later. In quick succession, the trio scored two more hits: "I'm Always Dreaming of You," recorded by Victor, and "The Crime I Didn't Do," an ARC recording. As before, Satherley, Long, and Autry split the royalties for these songs 50–25–25.
Stylistically and artistically, "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" marked a turning point in the career of young Autry. Satherley convinced the singer-songwriter to stop imitating Jimmie Rodgers's blue yodel sound and embrace the trendy old-time music favored by Jimmy Long, his boss on the Frisco Line and musical mentor. Satherley also persuaded the blue yodeler to capitalize on his Texas and Oklahoma roots by developing a singing cowboy persona, thereby launching Autry's career from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California.
Following a trajectory from song to live performance, sheet music, sound recording, radio broadcast, and gold record, the success of "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" made the singing cowboy's segue into the role of movie star appear natural. Riding a sea change in American music, Autry moved from performing in Tulsa as "The Sunny South's Blue Yodeler" to becoming "The Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy" in Chicago and then "The Original Singing Cowboy" in Hollywood. Autry's musical-Westerns offer a glimpse into the lives of rural, small-town, and newly urban Americans in the 1930s as people dealing with the cultural transformations accompanying significant transportation improvements, communications revolutions, and steadily increasing mobility. The singing cowboy joined a group of avant-garde musicians, writers, and filmmakers doing innovative, experimental, and unconventional work, presenting new hybrid forms of "country-western" music within new hybrid forms of "musical-Western" films.
Explanations for the hybridization of musical and motion picture genres have argued that the economic decline of 1929 influenced record companies and film studios to mash up their formulas, beginning with the combination of "country" and "Western" music. The country label included various subgenres such as "old time," "hillbilly," and "mountain" music. Western music was comprised mainly of cowboy songs compiled by John A. Lomax in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910) — songs like "Jesse James," "The Old Chisholm Trail," and "Whoopie Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Dogies."
Since 1930, country-western music has grown into an important facet of the entertainment industry. Financial success led to increased status and respect for the hybrid genre, known today as country music among the popular arts of the United States. The history of country-western music and American attitudes toward the genre reflected contradictions in a growing audience segment labeled "urban hillbilly." Urban hillbillies dealt with the polarization of living between two cultures: the old world of their parents back home on the farm and the new world of their peers in the growing cities of the American South and West. Appeasement between town and country necessitated an accommodation of values expressed, in part, through the hybridization of county-Western music and the identification of a fan base comprised of urban hillbillies.
In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Mediums Collide (2006), Henry Jenkins showed that hybridity occurs when one cultural industry — for example, that of motion pictures — absorbed and transformed elements from other cultural mediums. As Jenkins explained, "A hybrid work exists betwixt and between two cultural traditions while providing a path that can be explored from both directions." Convergence Culture framed hybridity as a strategy of dispossessed peoples struggling to resist or reshape the flow of mass media into their culture — taking electronic media imposed from the outside and making those media serve the purposes of the dispossessed. Autry's singing cowboy persona met the conditions of this definition for many rural, small-town, and newly urban Americans.
Jenkins also described hybridity as a corporate strategy that came from a position of strength rather than vulnerability or marginality, a strategy seeking control rather than containment of transcultural consumption. Here too, Autry met the conditions of hybridity as a multiplatform entertainer able to mash up the desires of both rural and urban audiences. Blending traditional and modern culture within a single corporate strategy, Autry took advantage of hybridity to create synergy by combining multiple information media. In this regard, Herbert J. Yates had the greatest influence over the singing cowboy. As head of Consolidated Film Industries, ARC Records and Republic Pictures, Yates shaped Autry's image as a recording artist and movie star into a transformative Western hero within a pantheon of Western heroes that included Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, William S. Hart, and Tom Mix, to name but a few of the classic characters representing American culture in the media history of the United States.
The mash up of country and Western music occurred simultaneously with news from national outlets revealing extreme poverty in the southern states. Franklin Roosevelt referred to Appalachia as a particularly depressed region. Americans increasingly perceived the Appalachian Mountains as a cultural site of backwardness and degradation. In response, musicians and their fans across the country turned away from urban hillbilly and embraced the classic image of the American cowboy hero, represented in motion pictures, popular fiction, Wild West shows, and rodeos. Roosevelt tapped into this sea change in American culture by announcing his favorite song was "Home on the Range." As the 1930s unfolded, hillbilly singers still sang about cabins in the mountains, now the Rocky Mountains, instead of the Cumberland Mountains. The Kentucky Ramblers became The Prairie Ramblers, backed up by Patsy Montana, and so on.
Meanwhile, a new music scene surfaced in Los Angeles, held together by the movie studios producing musical-Western films. Among the singing cowboys already in Hollywood, The Beverly Hillbillies emerged as progenitors of a new sound and style of musical performance. Combining the attributes of hillbilly music with Western folksongs and cowboy trappings, The Beverly Hillbillies premiered on Los Angeles Radio Station KMPC, showcasing a new country-western format with live radio play in 1930.
Seeing the sales numbers of "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine," Herbert Yates backed the play of Art Satherley to sign Gene Autry to a long-term contract with ARC Records. They recast the yodeling bluesman as a singing cowboy with hillbilly chops. Sears, Roebuck and Company collaborated with ARC to create a line of signature merchandise featuring the "Gene Autry" name and image. Satherley made a deal with Sears to sponsor personal appearances by the Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy on Chicago Radio Station WLS. Autry hosted Conqueror Record Time to promote record sales for Sears, making special guest appearances on Sears' Tower Topics and the WLS Barn Dance programs. In May 1932, when the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) syndicated the WLS Barn Dance, Autry expanded his fan base from coast to coast, making special guest appearances on the syndicated National Barn Dance.
Moreover, Sears sponsored Radio's Singing Cowboy to appear live, in person, on concert tours with the Round-Up of WLS Radio Stars. The traveling troupe did live shows from remote broadcasting locations in rural, small-town, and newly urban theaters throughout the upper Midwest. Theater owners combined these localized "barn dance" programs with double features of Westerns and musical-Western films featuring Ken Maynard and other Hollywood stars. The combined effects of these live performances, radio broadcasts, motion pictures, sound recordings, and advertising provided local exhibitors with a draw powerful enough to attract a crowd during the Depression years.
The licensed merchandise developed by Sears using Autry's name and image included sound recordings, sheet music, songbooks, and two guitars bearing the singing cowboy's signature. The Harmony Guitar Company made "Gene Autry Round Up" guitars and "Gene Autry Old Santa Fe" guitars for Sears. The giant retailer tied "Gene Autry" advertisements in its mail-order catalogs with Autry's personal appearances on WLS. "Gene Autry" merchandise targeted newly urban audiences of young women recently relocated from the countryside to Chicago and other Midwestern cities. Within this target market, "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" maintained enormous fan appeal from 1931–35. Autry's signature song served as a form of wheat paste, bonding the singing cowboy's live performances, sound recordings, radio broadcasts, motion pictures and licensed merchandise, with a large and growing fan base across multiple entertainment platforms.
The growth of radio broadcasting as a new information medium stands out as the greatest influence upon the hybridization of country-western music and musical-Western films. A U.S. census map titled "Radio Set Ownership 1930" revealed a cultural shift occurring as Autry became a star. Displaying the percentages of American families owning radio receiving sets, the map showed concentrations of listeners in and around New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles, where more than 50 percent of households listened to radio broadcasts. The map also revealed the existence of fewer radio receiving sets in the Southern and Southwestern states. Less than 20 percent of households in these regions had access to local or national broadcasting.
Limited access to electricity meant fewer radio stations and less competition for Sears in selling phonographs, sound recordings, and related merchandise in the South and Southwest. The number of households with radio receiving sets in many rural communities remained static until President Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration to make low-interest loans to local electrical cooperatives in 1935. These underserved regions saw dramatic change in 1936, when the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Boulder Canyon Project (Boulder/Hoover Dam), and other federal hydro projects began producing electricity. It was the late 1930s before rural cooperatives could build and operate new power lines throughout much of the South and Southwest. Many areas did not see service until after the Second World War.
New Dealers promoted the American West as a destination for commercial agricultural and industrial development. Simultaneously with the development of water and power resources, the federal government literally paved the way for the expansion of travel and tourism along U.S. Highway Route 66 — from Chicago to L.A. — and other highway construction projects. Improved roads, roadside attractions, and new accommodations were part of a New Deal plan to promote recreational tourism as an antidote for social divisions in American culture. The president believed that travel and tourism could temper revolutionary tendencies, right-wing reactionaries, and foreign aggression.
Regarding tourism as a key component for economic recovery, Roosevelt funded national advertising campaigns to stimulate cross-country travel, and he supported local efforts of business and civic leaders to promote tourism. The themes and storylines in country-western music and musical-Western films provided incentives for American worker-tourists with newly awarded two-week paid vacations to travel and take advantage of tourist promotions in the American West.
The hybridization of country-western music came about as national radio networks grew in the 1930s. Popular with rural, small-town, and newly urban radio listeners, country-western music offered national advertisers and politicians a means to access large and underserved audiences in the Midwest, South, and Southwest. When Republic Pictures began producing musical-Western films, the studio cross-promoted these cultural products with radio broadcasts, sound recordings, and live performances.
Art Satherley understood these trends when he signed Gene Autry to a long-term contract. Satherley persuaded Autry to get out front of major changes affecting the recording industry by adding some Western flare to his yodeling blues. Two weeks after Autry recorded "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine," the record producer arranged for the singing cowboy to premiere his new song and image before investors and advertisers in Manhattan. Dressed from head to toe in an outfit sold by Sears, the Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy sang "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" before a studio audience at New York Radio Station WPCH during a live broadcast at 4:45 P.M. on Friday, November 13, 1931.
Autry's new singing cowboy persona enabled Satherley to position the talented recording artist to ride a shifting tide in American media culture associated with the westernizing of hillbilly music and government promotions of western tourism and travel. The trend started in 1930, when radio programmer Glen Rice masked the hillbilly roots of one musical group with a veneer of cowboy culture. Broadcasting from Los Angeles Radio Station KMPC, Rice claimed to discover the musicians wandering in the Santa Monica Mountains, above Malibu, California. Dubbed The Beverly Hillbillies, the group used hillbilly terminology and mountain imagery, but they dressed similar to cowboys and performed songs like "When the Bloom is on the Sage," "Red River Valley," and "The Strawberry Roan." This fusion of hillbilly and cowboy styles gained notice with the rise of "Western Swing" music in Texas and elsewhere. Los Angeles grew in importance as a hotbed for musicians and radio programmers. Both Decca and Okeh paid more attention to the Southwest as they moved from recording hillbilly to country-western music.
The instant popularity of The Beverly Hillbillies convinced Art Satherley to promote the broader fusion of country-western music at ARC. Combining the regional musical styles of the South and the Southwest to create a musical hybrid form, Satherley transformed Gene Autry from the Sunny South's Blue Yodeler into the Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy. Subsequently, the A&R man used the Autry prototype to sign and record some of the biggest names in country-western music, including Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, the Carter Family, Roy Acuff, the Sons of the Pioneers, Bill Monroe, Lefty Frizzell, and Marty Robbins.
Responding to the lure of the new, country-western format, Autry signed an exclusive contract with ARC on December 1, 1931. He agreed to migrate from Tulsa to Chicago and reinvent himself as the Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy. Satherley paid the singing cowboy a stipend of $90 a month, plus music royalties, to record high-volume, low-markup songs for ARC to sell in rural, small-town, and newly urban markets. "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" fit the bill as a nostalgic song, evoking tensions between the road and the old home place. Nostalgic for many rural and small-town fans, Autry's hit song simultaneously guided newly urban audiences coming to terms with the rapid lifestyle changes brought on by industrialization and the traumas of dislocation, disenfranchisement, and dispossession.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Deal Cowboy by Michael Duchemin. Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction: America's Ace Cowboy 3
1 Country-Western Hybrid Music 18
2 Musical-Western Hybrid Film 44
3 New Deal, New West 66
4 The Second New Deal 91
5 The Good Neighbor Policy 118
6 Western Hemisphere Idea 138
7 Youth's Model, 1940 164
8 Sergeant Gene Autry 191
Conclusion: New Deal Cowboy 224
Notes 237
Bibliography 263
Index 305