Gene Autry and Roy Rogers helped turn low-budget westerns into a Hollywood money machine

I came across Douglas B. Green’s Singing in the Saddle while sorting through my bookshelves the other day. Published in 2002, it’s a comprehensive history of what was once a robust popular culture phenomenon. However quaint or incongruous the concept may sound to us now, “singing cowboy” movies were once a viable feature of the entertainment landscape.

Green distinguishes between Westerns that contain a song or two and those in which the music is a central part of the premise. He locates the transition point as 1934’s In Old Santa Fe, a conventional quickie Western in which an unbilled Gene Autry made his screen debut and stole the show with three songs.

The following year’s Tumbling Tumbleweeds assigned Autry top billing, featured seven songs, and is considered to have launched the singing cowboy era. Although it peaked in the 1930s and the early to mid-1940s, the genre didn’t finally give up the ghost until 1954.

Tumbling Tumbleweeds neatly exemplified the economics of the enterprise. Produced by Republic Pictures, it was shot over seven days in July 1935 and released in early September. And costing around $18,000, it generated revenue exceeding $500,000. Three more Autry vehicles found their way into theatres before year-end.

Over the balance of the decade, six to eight Autry movies appeared in any given year. The budgets got a bit bigger and shooting schedules were stretched to two weeks, but the profitable formula stayed firmly in place.

While other studios quickly jumped on the bandwagon with their own singing cowboys, Republic remained the dominant player. In addition to Autry, it had his biggest rival, Roy Rogers, under contract from 1937. But there was more to it than just star power.

Small budgets notwithstanding, Republic movies were technically superior in terms of photography, pacing and special effects. The studio could reputedly get up to 100 scenes a day, whereas an outfit like MGM would struggle to manage a dozen. To quote one Republic alumnus: “We were a very good highly overworked underpaid group of people … It was the best training anyone ever had.”

In addition to establishing the template, Autry was instrumental in the creation of Roy Rogers.

With contractual conflict curtailing Autry’s availability, Republic set out to find a replacement in 1937. And Len Slye, hitherto the sparkplug and middle voice of the popular harmony group Sons of the Pioneers, successfully auditioned for the part. Shortly thereafter he became Roy Rogers.

When Republic subsequently caved to unhappy exhibitors beefing about the lack of Autry product, star and studio resolved their differences. But once launched, Rogers’s movie career continued, albeit very much in Autry’s shadow.

Then came America’s entry into the Second World War, and, much to Republic’s displeasure, Autry’s 1942 enlistment. The studio responded by going into overdrive on Rogers, dubbing him king of the cowboys. And his career ascended to the stratosphere, eclipsing Autry’s hitherto-held position as the premier singing cowboy.

Despite being short of formal education, Autry possessed formidable business acumen that went far beyond show business. Beginning in the early 1940s, he embarked on an investment career that saw him owning radio and television stations, hotels, oil wells, ranches and ultimately a major league baseball franchise. Between 1983 and 1994, he was regularly featured on the Forbes 400 listing of America’s wealthiest.

Although not in the same investing league, Rogers was also financially shrewd. He may have been born in a humble two-room Ohio tenement, but he was nobody’s fool.

In 1938, he bought the palomino stallion Golden Cloud (aka Trigger, the smartest horse in the movies), thus ensuring that Republic couldn’t drop him without also forsaking access to the horse’s box-office power. And rather than haggle over salary, he made a deal with Republic granting him all merchandising rights. Along with the income from his many personal appearances, this became the basis for his fortune.

Green puts it this way: “… over the years Roy Rogers made untold millions from marketing his name and image on a bewildering panoply of products, from food to pyjamas to lunch boxes. As the King of the Cowboys, Roy’s persona became one of the most iconic images stamped on children’s items nationwide.”

Both men were also quick to see the writing on the wall when it came to television. Many in Hollywood resisted the new medium, but Roy and Gene recognized it as both inevitable and an opportunity.

First off the mark, The Gene Autry Show made its CBS debut on July 23, 1950, and ran until Dec. 24, 1955. NBC premiered The Roy Rogers Show on Dec. 30, 1951, broadcasting over a hundred episodes before its 1957 demise. In both cases, the shows were the property of their personal production companies. As well as providing control, this facilitated a revenue stream that, thanks to reruns, would persist beyond the initial broadcast lifespan.

Linked in professional life, they were also temporally associated in death. Roy went first, succumbing to congestive heart failure on July 6, 1998. He was 86.

Aged 91, Gene died from the consequences of lymphoma on Oct. 2 of the same year. Four years later, his baseball team—known at the time as the Anaheim Angels—won the World Series “for the Cowboy.”

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical—well, perhaps just a little bit.