Introduction to the old B-Westerns
I wanna try and talk about real cowboys
but who knows how they stank,
and thanks but nope, for romance crap –
I ain’t frantic to get that close
when they’ve been squat in the saddle,
addle-brained from direct Arizona sun
and kicked-up dust from a million cuds,
and all that bawling out in the dark
when they’ve been parked at campfires
waiting for the stampede sure to come
before they’d even found the Red River.
That’s why I sit in cool memory, safe
with a nineteen thirties celluloid thing
as a singing bow-legged cowboy leaps
from the Long Branch cattle trough,
and his polka-dotted Cayuse, who has
invited him to her slick saddle, looks back
and says, “Off we go, you handsome dude.”
– Charles Brady
Excuse me, please, but I’m about to exercise my right as an old codger to wax at some lengths about a peek at a past of which you may know little (Except a few of you – and you know who you are – the ones with a bit of a gut and a twinkle in the runny eye!)
The title is a reference to a pretty fair song by the Statler Brothers, and if you Google them you can find some videos and hear some great male harmony. If you have never heard of the Statler Brothers, you probably have not heard of Randolph Scott, and if you have never heard of Randolph Scott, you probably have not heard of any of the other people I want to tell you about. But stick with me. First some background.
My limited free time during my early days on this earth was not for television viewing or Broadway shows. I had very little “free time” growing up on small cotton and tobacco farms back in Georgia in the 1930s and 40s, and no access to towns big enough to have a movie theater. In fact, before my family moved to Savannah in 1942, where my step father had found employment at the rapidly expanding wartime shipyards, I had seen exactly one movie – a silent film – projected on a white sheet – about some ancient peoples, shown to an assembled group of bewildered primary students in Ridgeland, South Carolina.
And that showing was interrupted by the noontime rumbling of a passing freight train on the adjacent tracks of the Seaboard Coastline Railroad.
In Savannah, I soon discovered that a couple of shoe-shines on Bay Street would provide funds for the Saturday triple feature at the Savannah Theater, where for fifteen cents I could see a Charlie Chan or “Invisible Man,” a “B” Western, a chapter of the latest serial, and a couple of Bugs Bunny cartoons. Sometimes the manager would throw in a Three Stooges short. Every program came with the “Selected Short Subjects” promised in the previous week’s show.
Not long ago, while visiting my sister and her family in Georgia, I made a side trip to Savannah and, from memory, easily located the Savannah Theater, once an opera house converted in the 1930s to movies. When I lived there, spending many Saturdays lost in the air-conditioned darkness, it was by far the most popular movie house in the city. In the 1940s, the Savannah was the oldest theater in continuous operation in the country. It is now a live performance venue.
All this is background for the telling of how my memory button was brought back to life by a particular song I ran across recently on YouTube.
To a country kid, fresh from the backwoods, the old movie houses were magic, and the old black and white westerns, churned out in about three weeks, always with simple good guy – bad guys, pretty ranchers’ daughters and shy but somewhat handsome cowboys – who were the center pieces of my wartime Saturdays.
In those simple morality plays, set in Hollywood versions of the old West, with cowboys, saloons, cattle drives and pretty schoolmarms, one always knew which side to cheer for! The lone cowboy rode into town, or along a three-strand barbed wire fence leading to a ranch house only to encounter a bunch of bad guys. You could tell they were bad men because they were always shooting up the place or threatening the pretty daughter of the ranch owner, and because they LOOKED like bad guys.
From the beginning, we knew what was to happen. The cowboy figured out the plans of the wicked gang and, despite the sheriff’s being in cahoots with the baddies, the cowboy would save the young lady from a fate worse than death, the ranch from foreclosure and the owner’s horses from being rustled.
How I got that new flashback is another story.
I recently heard a passing reference to an old Statler Brothers song from a few years back, and felt immediately that I needed to Google and hear it again. Just the mention of the title had transported me back, but not to the brothers themselves, and not to their close harmony, which was darned good.
The song I heard that day is, “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott.”
The Statler Brothers were handing out a not too subtle message there, something to do with good and evil, with good always winning, of course. However, that song in particular was making an additional statement about the loss of simpler times – periods when cowboys said “Ma am” and “eye doggies” and would never draw first, always letting the outlaws make.
And the song got more personal since each refrain ended with, ”…and whatever happened to Randolph Scott happened to be best of me.”
I hope at least a few of you remember Randolph Scott, that tall slim and perfect movie gentleman with the gentle smile, who starred in a lot of movies but is best known as one of the best of the B movie cowboys. I liked him a lot, and will still stop what I’m doing to watch an old movie when I see he’s in it.
However, Randolph Scott was much more than a B-western player. He got noticed early and climbed steadily, winding up with a long career. He did much of his best work as a serious actor in the late 1950s and 60s. I recommend you try to find his last movie – considered his best – “Ride The High Country”, released in 1962 and co-staring Joel McCrea, an actor much like Scott who often competed with him for roles.
And Randolph Scott was not the only good guy mentioned in the song – the Statlers rattled of a whole litany of “B” Movie cowboy names in their many verses. The inclusion of those names got me further involved in a blurry mix of cowboys and their horses and the various tricks and mannerisms which gave them their own identities during the brief period of their B-Movie stardom.
In the early 1940’s, the war was going on, but on Saturdays my friends and I could walk into the Savannah Theater any time of day (once begun, the movies ran continuously without breaks) and take part in the golden era of cheap cowboy movies starring interchangeable former bit players and a few authentic rodeo regulars.
Let me tell you of a few of the old timey cowboy stars – and their weak acting had little to do with my choices.
To enjoy those movies, and I did, one had to enjoy the simplicity of the art. With Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, Bob Steele and the like, the plot was immediate and you didn’t have to figure out motivations. They were all pretty good at sprinting out of the barn and hitting their saddles without rupturing themselves, and they found conveniently soft ground on hillsides on which to fall off horses wile clutching the shirts of the bad guy. After they landed, there was always a badly choreographed fight.
I had a special affection for the cowhands with pearl handled colts.
Some people (but not many of us boys) enjoyed one or more of the singing cowboys. When it got to be one or the other, I chose Roy Rogers over Gene Autry. Old Roy had a twinkle in his eye and he sang a heck of a lot better than Gene. And Trigger was the smartest and best looking of all the horses. Roy usually starred with a vaiety of petty young women, but I never warmed up to Dale Evans, who came along later. She couldn’t act or sing very well, but Roy seemed to like her. He even married her in real life!
Roy’s band was “The Sons of the Pioneers,” greatest of all those Western singing groups, and they had a lot of hit records without Roy, who had been the leader of the group before he was picked out of the bunch to star in the movies. They were originally “Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers”.
As for Gene Autry, I guess a lot of people liked him, because he made a lot of movies then started his own TV empire, going on to make a lot of money – even bought himself a baseball team for Anaheim. (My best friend’s mother named her youngest son “Gene Autry McFerrin.” Poor kid had to live with that.)
The single lowest point in cowboy singing movies was just about the lowest point in the entire history of all moving pictures! That was when some demented soul dubbed a deep baritone voice for a badly lip-syncing John Wayne in one of his early days on Republic Pictures’ back lot. That one scene kept John Wayne out of the big time until he got lucky by snagging that role in “Stagecoach,” where he only had to curl up on the floor of the coach and look cute.
I’m going to hold out a little for later. Maybe in a column to come I can devote time to the rodeo riders and real cowboys who got to star in those low budget westerns, and I’d like to write a little more about Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd), who became a Western star at just before retirement age – actually only forty. He didn’t exactly romance the young ranchers’ daughters, going instead for the slightly older schoolmarms. I liked Hopalong, white hair and all.
A lot has been written about the Western Star’s sidekicks – they always had one, usually to provide humor (which often was not that funny). “Gabby” Hayes was my favorite. Smiley Burnett, Gene Autry’s sidekick, was not that funny, but he was properly rotund and had a great movie name – “Frog Milhouse.” He had a tag-a-long nephew named “Tadpole,” believe it or not.
Today, if you’ve a mind to, you can watch some of those old two-reelers on your computer. Just Google, “Free Old Western Movies” and choose one. Here’s a list of some of the old 1940s cowboy stars if you want to look them up. Just Google a name or “Free Westerns Movies.”
Hoot Gibson
Ken Maynard
Bob Steele
Tex Ridder – Yes, HIS dad – (Tex had a certain singing style – I never coted to him – kind of a “Jimmy Cracked Corn” kind of singer) He just talked and called it acting.
Lash Larue
Tom Mix
Johnny Mack Brown
Don Red Barry (Red Ryder)
Wild Bill Elliot (He was my favorite. He was at first a bit player, once a walk-on who made a lot of movies until he was chosen for a serial about Wild Bill Hickock. He liked that “Wild Bill” name so he just took it! He was soft spoken (he spoke through clenched teeth but in an easy-going way) and handsome, and was known for always underplaying. To be different, he wore his twin sixguns with their butts to the front and would “cross draw” – drove us kids wild!)
