Gene Autry
Orvin Gene Autry
BORN: September 29, 1907, Tioga Springs, TX
DIED: October 2, 1998, Studio City, CA
Gene Autry was more than a musician. His music, coupled with his careers
in movies and on radio and television, made him a part of the mythos that
has made up the American identity for the past hundred years -- John Wayne
with a little bit of Sam Houston and Davy Crockett all rolled into one, with
a great singing voice and an ear for music added on. He defined country music
for two generations of listeners, and cowboy songs for much of this century,
and American music for much of the world. He was country music's first genuine
"multi-media" star, the best known country & western singer on records,
in movies, on radio, and television from the early-'30s until the mid-'50s.
His 300 songs cut between 1929 and 1964 include nine gold-record awards and
one platinum record; his 93 movies saved one big chunk of the movie industry,
delighted millions, and made millionaires of several producers (as well as
Autry himself); his radio and television shows were even more popular and
successful; and a number of his songs outside of the country & western
field have become American pop-culture touchstones.
The biggest selling country & western singer of the middle of the century
was born Orvon Gene Autry on September 29, 1907 in the tiny Texas town of
Tioga, the son of Delbert and Elnora Ozmont Autry. He was first taught to
sing at age five by his grandfather, William T. Autry, a Baptist preacher
and descendant of some of the earliest settlers in Texas, contemporaries
of the Houstons and the Crocketts (an Autry had died at the Alamo). The boy's
interest in music was encouraged by his mother, who taught him hymns and
folk songs, and reading psalms to him at night. Autry got his first guitar
at age 12, bought from the Sears, Roebuck catalog for eight dollars (saved
from his work as a hired hand on his uncle's farm baling and stacking hay).
By the time he was 15, he had played anyplace there was to perform in Tioga,
including school plays and the local cafe, but made most of his living working
for the railroad as an apprentice at $35 a month. Later on, as a proper telegraph
operator, he was making $150 a month which, in those days, was a comfortable
income in their part of Texas.
He was working the four-to-midnight shift at the local telegraph office in
Chelsea, Oklahoma one summer night in 1927 when, to break up the monotony,
he began strumming a guitar and singing quietly to himself. A customer came
into the office; rather than insisting upon immediate service, he motioned
for Autry to continue singing, then sat down to watch and listen while he
looked over the pages he was preparing to send. At one point, the visitor
asked him to sing another. Finally, after dropping his copy on the counter,
the customer told Autry that with some hard work, he might have a future
on the radio, and should consider going to New York to pursue a singing career.
The man, whom Autry had recognized instantly, was Will Rogers, the humorist,
writer, movie actor, and one of the most popular figures in the entertainment
world of that era.
Autry didn't immediately give up his job, but just over a year later, he
was in New York auditioning for a representative of RCA-Victor. The judgment
was that he had a good voice, but should stay away from pop hits, find his
own kind of songs and his own sound, and get some experience. He was back
six months later, on October 9, 1929, cutting his first record, "My Dreaming
of You"/"My Alabama Home," for Victor. Two weeks later, Autry was making
a demo record for the Columbia label of Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel No. 5."
Present that same day in the studio were two up-and-coming singers, Rudy
Vallee and Kate Smith. Autry found himself being pressured to sign an exclusive
contract with Victor, but chose instead to sign with the American Record
Corporation. Their general manager, Arthur Sattherly (who would later record
Leadbelly, among many other acts), persuaded Autry that while Victor was
a large company and could offer more money and a better marketing apparatus,
he would be lost at Victor amid its existing stable of stars, whereas ARC
would treat him as their most important star. Additionally, Sattherly --
through a series of arrangements involving major retail and chain stores
across the country -- now had the means to get Autry's records into peoples'
hands as easily as Victor.
His first recordings had just been released when his mother, who'd been ill
for months, died at the age of 45, apparently of cancer. Autry's father began
drifting away soon afterward, and he became the head of the family and the
main supporter of himself, two sisters, and a younger brother. In early December
of 1929, Autry cut his first six sides for ARC. The music was a mix of hillbilly,
blues, country, yodel songs, and cowboy ballads. His breakthrough record,
"That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine," co-written by Autry and his friend Jimmy
Long one night at the railroad depot, was released in 1931. The song had
sold 30,000 copies within a month, and by the end of a year 500,000 had been
sold, an occasion that American Records decided to mark with the public presentation
of a gold-plated copy of the record. Autry received a second gold record
when sales later broke one million. And that was where the notion of the
Gold Record Award was born. The record also led him into a new career on
the radio as Oklahoma's Yodeling Cowboy on the National Barn Dance show sponsored
by WLS out of Chicago. It was there that Autry became a major national star
-- his record sales rose assisted by his exposure on radio.
During the early years of his career, Autry took a number of important collaborators
and musicians aboard. Among them were Fred Rose, the songwriter (later responsible
for "Your Cheatin' Heart") with whom he collaborated on many of his hits;
and fiddle-player Carl Cotner (who also played sax, clarinet, and piano),
who became his arranger. Autry had a knack for knowing a good song when he
heard it (though he almost passed on the biggest hit of his career), and
for knowing when a song needed something extra in its arrangement, but it
was Cotner who was able to translate his sensibilities into musical notes
and arrangements. Mary Ford, later of Les Paul fame, was in Autry's band
at one time, and in 1936, Autry signed up a 17-year-old guitar player named
Merle Travis, the future country star and songwriter.
By the early '30s, Autry became one of the most beloved singers in country
& western music. By 1933, he was getting fan letters by the hundreds
every week, and his record sales were only going up. Autry's career might've
been made right there, but fate intervened again that year, in the form of
the movie business. The western -- especially the "B" western, the bottom-of-the-bill,
low-budget action oater -- had been hit very hard by the coming of sound
in the years 1927 to 1929. Audiences expected dialogue in their movies, and
most western stars up to that time were a lot better at riding, roping, and
shooting than reading lines. Not only did producers and directors need something
to fill up the soundtracks of their movies, especially on the limited budgets
of the B-westerns, but something to substitute for violent action, which
was being increasingly criticized by citizen groups.
Cowboy star Ken Maynard, who was a great trick rider and stuntman but no
singer, had tried singing songs in a few of his movies, and the producers
noticed that the songs had gone over well despite his vocal limitations.
Maynard was making another western, In Old Santa Fe (1934), for Mascot Pictures,
and producer Nat Levine decided to try an experiment, putting in a musical
number sung by a professional. By sheer chance, the American Record Company
and Mascot Pictures were locked together financially, though indirectly,
and with the help from the president of ARC, Levine was steered toward Autry.
A phone call brought the young singer and another ARC performer -- multi-instrumentalist/comedian
Smiley Burnette -- out to Hollywood, where, after a quick meeting and screen
test, the two were put into In Old Santa Fe. Autry had only one scene, singing
a song and calling a square dance, but that scene proved to be one of the
most popular parts of the movie.
Levine next stuck Autry and Burnette into a Ken Maynard serial, Mystery Mountain,
in minor supporting roles. But Autry's next appearance was much more important,
as the star of the highly successful 12-chapter serial The Phantom Empire.
Perhaps recognizing that Autry was no "actor," and that he had an audience
of millions already, he, the writers, and the producer agreed that he should
simply play "Gene Autry," a good-natured radio singer and sometime cowboy.
The success of Autry's early films was not enough to save Mascot Pictures,
which collapsed under the weight of debts held by Consolidated Film Laboratories,
which did Mascot's film processing. In 1935, Consolidated forced a merger
of Mascot and a handful of other small studios and formed Republic Pictures,
with Consolidated's president Herbert J. Yates at the helm. Republic thrived
in the B-movie market, ultimately dominating the entire field for the next
20 years. And central to Republic's success were the westerns of Gene Autry.
His first starring western for the newly organized Republic Pictures, Tumbling
Tumbleweeds (released Sept. 5, 1935), which also included the singing group
the Sons of the Pioneers, was a huge hit, and was followed by Melody Trail,
The Sagebrush Troubador, and The Singing Vagabond, all released during the
final three months of 1935. Autry settled into a schedule of one movie every
six weeks, or eight-per-year, at $5000 per movie, and a formula was quickly
established. The production values on these movies were modest, in keeping
with their low budgets and tight shooting schedules, but within the framework
of B-westerns, and the context of their music, they were first-rate productions.
By 1937, and for five years after -- a string that was only broken when he
enlisted in the army during World War II -- Autry was rated in an industry
survey of theater owners as one of the top ten box-office attractions in
the country, alongside the likes of James Cagney and Clark Gable. Autry was
the only cowboy star to make the list, and the only actor from B-movies on
the list.
For Republic Pictures, his movies were such a cash cow, and so popular in
the southern, border, and western states, that the tiny studio was able to
use them as a way to force "block booking" on theater owners and chains --
that is, theaters only got access to the Autry movies scheduled each season
if they bought all of Republic's titles for that season. It was Autry's discovery
of this policy (which, in fairness, was practiced by every major studio at
the time, and led to the anti-trust suit by the government that ultimately
forced the studios to give up their theater chains) in early 1938 that led
to his first break with Republic. The problems had been brewing for some
time, over Autry's unhappiness at never having gotten a raise from his original
Mascot-era $5000-per-movie deal, and contractual clauses -- which had never
been exercised, but worried him nonetheless -- giving Republic a share of
his radio, personal appearance, and endorsement earnings. After trying unsuccessfully
to work out the problems with Yates, Autry walked out of the studio chief's
office and thereafter refused to report for the first day's shooting on a
movie called Washington Cowboy, later re-titled Under Western Stars when
it became the debut of Roy Rogers.
After eight months of legal sparring, Autry was left enjoined from making
live appearances. Republic, however, found itself with an uprising of theater
owners and chains on its hands--without a guarantee that they would have
any Autry movies to release, the studio's entire annual distribution plans
were jeopardized. By the fall of 1938 the two sides had come to terms, with
raises for Autry and freedom from the most onerous clauses in his old contract.
Despite his best efforts, however, he couldn't help the theater owners over
the block-booking policy, for it was now entrenched in the industry and an
integral part of Republic's business plan.
Meanwhile, his recording career continued, often in tandem with the movies.
Whenever Republic could, they licensed the rights to whatever hit song Autry
had most recently recorded to use it as the title of his newest picture --
when they did this, they always charged the theater owners somewhat more
for the film, and they paid it, because the song had "pre-sold" the movie
to the public. The songs kept coming, sometimes out of the movies themselves,
and not always his own: Autry's friend Ray Whitley had written "Back in the
Saddle Again" for a 1938 George O'Brien western called Border G-Man, and
when Autry was looking for a theme song for his own radio show, he went back
to Whitley's song, made a few changes, and recorded it himself. Along with
"That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine," it was the song he would be most closely
associated with.
Autry's career was interrupted by his service in the military during World
War II, but when he returned to the recording and movie studios in 1945,
he resumed both his singing and film careers without skipping a beat. He
was still a name to be reckoned with at the box office, although he was never
again ranked among the top-ten money-making stars of movies. The cultural
dislocations caused by World War II and their effect upon rural and small-town
America, and on the movie business, as well as the impending arrival of television,
had shrunk the B-movie market to a shadow of its 1930s glory. His movies
still made money, however, and he kept making them right into the beginning
of the 1950s, after which he moved into television production -- Autry had
already begun buying up radio stations before the war, and by the early '50s
he was owner of several television stations, a studio, and his own production
company, where he made his own television program as well as others that
he owned.
His singing career was bigger than ever, however. Even before the war, Autry
had occasionally moved away from country music and scored big, as with his
1940 hit version of "Blueberry Hill," which predated Fats Domino's recording
by 16 years. After the war, he still did cowboy and country songs such as
"Silver Spurs" and "Sioux City Sue," sprinkled with occasional folk songs
and pop numbers. In 1949, however, Autry scored the biggest single hit of
his career -- and possibly the second- or third-biggest hit song ever recorded
up to that time -- with "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," a song by Johnny
Marks that Autry had recorded only reluctantly, in a single take at the end
of a session.That same year, he cut "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky," a number
by a former forest ranger named Stan Jones, which became both a country and
pop music standard, cut by everyone from Vaughan Monroe to Johnny Cash.
By the mid-'50s, Autry's career had slowed. Rock & roll and rhythm &
blues were attracting younger listeners, and a new generation of country
music stars, heralded by Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins, were beginning to
attract serious sales. Autry, then in his forties, still had his audience,
but he gradually receded from the limelight to attend to his burgeoning business
interests. He died October 2, 1998. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
Though born in Texas, Gene Autry has always regarded Oklahoma as his home.
During his formative years, Autry was gainfully employed in several capacities
by the St Louis & San Francisco Railroad. Legend has it that while working
as a telegrapher late one evening, Autry passed the time by singing and plunking
the guitar whereupon he was advised to pursue a show business career by a
drop-in visitor who turned out to be cowboy humorist Will Rogers. Whatever
the case, Autry left railroad work behind to try his luck as a local radio
performer.
In 1934, with his own radio show and several moderately popular recordings
to his credit, Autry headed to Hollywood, where at the time there was a ready
market for country & western performers. He made his screen debut as
a specialty act in Ken Maynard's In Old Santa Fe (1934); this led to a leading
role in the 13-episode Mascot serial Phantom Empire, a truly bizarre outing
wherein he played a radio crooner who made period visits to the art deco
underground city of Murania. Among the tunes sung by Autry in this epic was
"Silver Haired Daddy of Mine," the first of his many Top Ten hits. When Mascot
metamorphosed into Republic in late 1935, Autry went along for the ride as
the studio's resident cowboy star. Though he couldn't ride, shoot, or even
act at first, he improved steadily as he went along, and by the late '30s
he was Hollywood's number one box-office attraction. Aware of his value to
Republic, Autry insisted upon huge salary increases, prompting the parsimonious
studio to develop another singing cowboy, Roy Rogers, as a "threat" (though
the studio fabricated the feud between Autry and Rogers, the two men remained
fast friends).
His film career was interrupted by WWII, in which Autry served with distinction
as an Air Force flight officer. Upon returning to Hollywood, he realized
he'd outgrown Republic, and after 54 features with the studio set up his
own production company, Flying A. From 1947 to 1957, Autry's company produced
a successful series of theatrical features for Columbia release, and also
a whole slew of popular TV programs, including The Gene Autry Show (1950-1956),
Red Ryder (1951-1952), Annie Oakley (1954-1956), Buffalo Bill Jr. (1954),
and The Adventures of Champion (1955), the latter series a vehicle for Autry's
equally famous horse. All during this period, he continued turning out successful
records, the most successful of which were the atypical "Here Comes Santa
Claus," "Peter Cottontail," and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."
An extraordinarily astute businessman, Autry ran such profitable enterprises
as Los Angeles TV station KTLA and the California Angels baseball team. In
the 1970s, he became one of show business' handful of billionaires; as his
old movie sidekick Pat Buttram wryly remarked, "Gene used to ride off into
the sunset. Now he owns it." Persistent stories of Gene Autry's pinchpenny
business practices and his bouts with the bottle (which Autry detailed in
his 1978 autobiography) can be forgotten in the light of the countless hours
of entertainment he has brought to his legions of fans, and to the legacy
he leaves behind in the form of the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, which
he established in 1988. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide