Autry signed a recording deal with Columbia Records in In his early recording career, Autry covered various genres, including a labor song, "The Death of Mother Jones ", in Autry also recorded many " hillbilly "-style records in and in New York City, which were certainly different in style and content from his later recordings. These late Prohibition-era songs deal with bootlegging, corrupt police, and women whose occupation was certainly vice.
Roy Rogers
These recordings are generally not heard today, but are available on European import labels, such as JSP Records. He heard all of the spectators watching the parade saying "Here comes Santa Claus! He recorded his version of the song in and it became an instant classic. Autry was the original owner of Challenge Records. The label's biggest hit was "Tequila" by The Champs in , which started the rock-and-roll instrumental craze of the late s and early s. He sold the label soon after, but the maroon and later green label has the "GA" in a shield above the label name. Autry made recordings, including more than songs written or co-written by himself.
His records sold more than million copies and he has more than a dozen gold and platinum records, including the first record ever certified gold. Autry and Burnette were discovered by film producer Nat Levine in Shortly thereafter, Mascot was absorbed by the newly formed Republic Pictures Corp. Buttram would co-star with Gene Autry in more than 40 films and in over episodes of Autry's television show. In the Motion Picture Herald Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars poll, Autry was listed every year from the first poll in to and to he was serving in the AAF —45 , holding first place to , and second place after Roy Rogers to , when the poll ceased.
Part of his military service included his broadcast of a radio show for one year; it involved music and true stories. Several decades ago on an early afternoon show featuring Republic westerns, one of Gene's sidekicks said that when Gene told Republic Pictures of his intentions to join the military during World War II, Republic threatened to promote Roy Rogers as King of the Cowboys in Gene's absence, which it did. Gene briefly returned to Republic after the war to finish out his contract.
The contract had been suspended for the duration of his military service, and he had tried to have it declared void after his discharge. Republic did then publicize him as King of the Singing Cowboys. After , Autry formed his own production company to make Westerns under his own control, which continued the distribution agreement with Columbia Pictures. He renamed it the Melody Ranch after his movie Melody Ranch.
The Western town, adobes , and ranch cabin sets and open land for location shooting were retained as a movie ranch on 12 acres. A decade after he purchased Melody Ranch, a brushfire swept through in August , destroying most of the original standing sets. However, the devastated landscape did prove useful for productions such as Combat! A complete adobe ranch survived at the northeast section of the ranch. In , after his favorite horse Champion, which lived in retirement there, died, Autry put the remaining acre ranch up for sale.
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In response to his many young radio listeners aspiring to emulate him, Autry created the Cowboy Code, or Ten Cowboy Commandments. These tenets promoting an ethical, moral, and patriotic lifestyle that appealed to youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts, which developed similar doctrines. The Cowboy Code consisted of rules that were "a natural progression of Gene's philosophies going back to his first Melody Ranch programs—and early pictures. Holding a private pilot certificate, he was determined to become a military pilot and earned his Service Pilot rating in June , serving as a C transport pilot with the rank of flight officer.
Assigned to a unit of the Air Transport Command , he flew as part of the dangerous airlift operation over the Himalayas between India and China, nicknamed the Hump. In , at the height of his screen popularity, Autry had a string of rodeo stock based in Ardmore, Oklahoma. A year later, he became a partner in the World Championship Rodeo Company, which furnished livestock for many of the country's major rodeos. In , he acquired Montana's top bucking string from the estate of Leo J. For the next 12 years, they provided livestock for most of the major rodeos in Texas, Colorado, Montana, and Nebraska.
When the company was sold in , both men continued to be active in rodeo. Gene Autry was often portrayed in the comics, primarily during the heyday of Western-themed comics , the s and s. From to , Autry was the subject of a comic book initially published by Fawcett Comics and then picked up by Dell Comics that ran 12 issues. Dell then published issues of Gene Autry Comics from to That title was changed to Gene Autry and Champion , and ran an additional 20 issues from to , making it the longest-running by number of issues cowboy actor comic book. The strip was produced in association with Whitman Publishing.
Autry retired from show business in , having made almost films up to and over records. After retiring, he invested widely and in real estate, radio, and television. He also purchased the rights from the dying Republic Pictures for films he had made for the company. Melody Ranch burned down in , dashing Autry's plans to turn it into a museum. A son, Roy, Jr. Grace died of complications from the birth a few days later, on November 3. Rogers met Dale Evans in when they were cast in a film together. They fell in love soon after Grace's death, and Rogers proposed to her during a rodeo at Chicago Stadium.
Together they had five children: Robin Elizabeth, who had Down syndrome and died of complications with mumps shortly before her second birthday, and four adopted children—Mimi, Dodie, Sandy, and Debbie. Rogers and Evans remained married until his death in In Rogers and Evans purchased a acre ranch near Chatsworth, California , complete with a hilltop ranch house, [20] expanding it to acres. Rogers died of congestive heart failure on July 6, He had been residing in Apple Valley, California. Rogers received recognition from the State of Arkansas, appointed by the governor of that state with an Arkansas Traveler certificate.
Rogers was also twice elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame , first as a member of the Sons of the Pioneers in , and again as a soloist in Rogers himself makes an appearance in the music video for the song " Heroes and Friends " by Randy Travis. Rogers is referenced in numerous films, including Die Hard in which the Bruce Willis character John McClane used the pseudonym "Roy" and remarks, "I was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers actually. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Roy Rogers disambiguation. Rogers in The Carson City Kid , Cincinnati , Ohio , U.
Apple Valley, California , U. Grace Arline Wilkins m. Dale Evans ; 9 children jointly m. The Life of Roy Rogers". Retrieved April 29, Retrieved August 27, The Encyclopedia of Western Movies.
Gene Autry
Retrieved October 31, Archived from the original on The Answer Is God. The New Original Wonder Woman". Pedigree Online Thoroughbred Database. The Sons of the Pioneers. Laid to Rest in California: History of the Arkansas Traveler". Country Music Hall of Fame. Palm Springs Walk of Stars. Archived from the original PDF on October 13, Retrieved August 9, Thus, the cowboy and the West had been bathed in romance long before Hollywood and the television industry began their exploitations of the theme.
Although a few concert-musicians such as Oscar Fox from Burnet, Texas and David Guion from Ballinger, Texas made classical arrangements of a few cowboy songs, the western theme did not make any significant impact on American music until the s. Such songs became so widely circulated in the s that even Tin Pan Alley reverberated with the melodies of the range.
Gene Autry - Wikipedia
The farther Americans became removed from the cowboy past, the more intense became their interest in cowboy songs and lore. Hillbilly singers and musicians did much to implant the romantic cowboy image in the minds of their American audiences. Before the s, a few musicians recorded songs that genuinely reflected the cowboy heritage. Charles Nabell, in November , recorded some cowboy songs for Okeh, along with other types of traditional material.
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Several of the early cowboy singers came from Texas, and their songs, for the most part, reflected genuine cowboy experience. Carl Sprague, for example, may have done most to generate an immediate interest in the recorded songs of the cowboy. He grew up on a South Texas ranch near Alvin where he learned many of the songs most of them from his cowboy uncle that he later recorded for Victor.
He traveled to New York and had a successful audition with Victor Records; his earliest recordings had a sound very similar to that of Dalhart, including guitar and studio violin. Singing, however, was never more than a hobby with Sprague, and aside from his recordings, he made few commercial appearances. Jules Verne Allen, on the other hand, had actually experienced the rugged life of a working cowboy before he embarked on his career as a radio singer. From to he worked as a rough string rider and bronco buster from the Rio Grande to the Montana line. Unlike Sprague, he used cowboy music as the basis for a professional career.
Other cowboy singers of the early commercial period varied widely in the amount of actual range experience they possessed. Essentially a fiddle band, the Cartwrights performed a variety of songs. The song became one of the most popular western numbers, performed usually with a chorus added by the California radio singers Fred Howard and Nat Vincent. At least a couple of the pioneer cowboy singers, Goebel Reeves and Harry McClintock, were southerners whose wanderlust drew them west, where they worked at a wide variety of occupations.
Our knowledge of the otherwise shadowy figure of Goebel Reeves comes from the pioneering research done by Fred Hoeptner. Before his death in California in , he had enjoyed a varied career that led him across the United States and around the world. Although he came from a respectable middle-class family his father served in the Texas legislature , Reeves deliberately chose the life of a hobo.
During the course of his wanderings, he enlisted in the army, saw front-line service in World War I, worked as a merchant seaman, became active in the IWW, toured the vaudeville circuit, performed on radio, and recorded under several names for such companies as Okeh and Brunswick. Harry McClintock was as well traveled as Reeves, having also been a merchant seaman, a soldier, and a hobo.
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Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he roamed widely throughout the United States and became a member of the IWW in the early twentieth century. John White and Otto Gray contributed to the shaping of western music by presenting it widely to a national audience. However, he was the first person to introduce cowboy songs on radio to a New York audience on NBC from to Otto Gray, a prosperous rancher from near Stillwater, Oklahoma, pioneered in the commercialization of cowboy music.
From to , Gray and his Oklahoma Cowboys made a tour of radio stations throughout the country and performed on the northeastern RKO vaudeville circuit.
The Oklahoma Cowboys were a highly professional group that possessed most of the characteristics of slick show-business organizations. A special publicity man traveled in advance of the group, and appearances on radio stations provided further exposure.
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As discussed earlier, Rodgers spent the last few years of his life in Texas and conducted many of his most successful tours there. He took great pride in the Texas heritage and the romantic cowboy past. Others, like Ernest Tubb, included few cowboy songs in their repertories but wore cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats.
Autry was born on a horse farm near Tioga, Texas, on September 29, , but moved to Oklahoma with his parents while in his teens. Although his father was a horse trader, one finds that Gene experienced little of the cattle ranch life that his promotional material later stressed. According to a much-repeated story, confirmed by Autry himself, Will Rogers inspired his decision to become a professional musician.
One day in the great humorist came to Chelsea, Oklahoma, where Autry was working as a telegrapher for the St. Louis and Frisco Railroad, heard the young man singing and strumming his guitar, and strongly encouraged him to go to New York and become a professional. In Chicago after , Autry was an immediate success. His records, released on Sears labels, were those most prominently displayed in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue.
As a result of his growing popularity, a number of Gene Autry songbooks and guitar instruction books began to appear in the early s. With Autry ensconced as a singing movie cowboy, hillbilly music now had a new medium through which to popularize itself. In his early years as a professional singer, and on through the WLS period from to , Autry remained a hillbilly singer, only rarely singing anything of a western variety.
In both song selection and in style of performance, he revealed his indebtedness to the southern rural tradition. While the song seemed rather remote from the type one would expect from a cowboy singer, it nevertheless reflected the passion for social and economic justice that many people felt during these Depression years.