Riders in the Past

Hollywood tastes are notoriously fickle, but for 30 years the Western, with its cowboys, cowgirls and various sidekicks breaking out into song, was the reigning fad of the day. Nashville writer and performer Douglas B. Green—otherwise known as Ranger Doug of the two-time Grammy-winning group Riders in the Sky, and author of two previous books on the subject—honors the genre and its stars with Singing Cowboys (Gibbs Smith, 144 pp., $39.95). This is the truest of coffee table books: oversized and hefty, with movie stills, posters and publicity shots rendered in full Technicolor. The book profiles nearly 60 artists, their stories and Hollywood stats told in concise, thorough prose. Here you’ll find the well knowns of the genre, such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, as well as a range of other, more surprising musical cowboys: Dorothy Page, Bing Crosby, Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis, country stars Tex Ritter and Marty Robbins, and that icon of Westerns himself, John Wayne. His turn as Singin’ Sandy Saunders in Riders of Destiny (1933) was his first and only part as a singing cowboy, the embarrassment of the dubbed vocals having soured him on the experience. Green’s emphasis is on honoring the singing cowboy. He provides more of an introduction to the genre itself than a chronicling of its history, and his book should appeal to both the amateur collector and the merely nostalgic. The approach is reverent kitsch—the songs may be hokey, the movie posters endearingly overdramatic, but that’s all part of the fun. During the height of the genre’s popularity—the 1930s through the ’50s—the world experienced the Great Depression, World War II and the Korean conflict. Like so many Hollywood productions, the Western provided a way to escape. As Douglas Green concludes, such movies offered “optimism and hope and the dream that with a little courage and a lovely song, evil could be vanquished and peace restored to a troubled land.”