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| Fun, accidental mash-up... |
Due to poor artist selection, I’m going to have to pad this post a little. Who knew the Girls of the Golden West left such a thin history?
I took a stab at a short history and light theorizing about country music in the first post in this mini-series, so I thought I’d fill that in by talking a bit about two of the iconic vehicles for popularizing the genre during the 1920s through 1940s. Those would be, in order, the National Barn Dance, which broadcast out of Chicago, Illinois, and the show that became the Grand Ole Opry, which broadcast out of Nashville. WLS-AM carried the former, WSM-AM carried the latter and both were “clear-channel” stations, 50,000 watt behemoths with almost unimaginably powerful signals in today’s radio market. As noted in the Wikipedia entry on the National Barn Dance:
“…because the clear-channel signal of WLS could be received throughout most of the Midwest and even beyond in the late evening and nighttime hours, making much of the United States (and Canada) a potential audience.”
A guy named Edgar L. Bill started the National Barn Dance in 1924 - which, incidentally, predates the alleged birth of country music, 1927’s famous Bristol Sessions (see the first post in the series) - and he started it on a hunch:
“Having lived on a farm, he knew how people loved the familiar sound and informal spirit of old-fashioned barn dance music.”
After starting as a one-off (“an impromptu sustaining program”), it became a fixture once an “avalanche of phone calls and letters” confirmed an audience existed for Bill’s kind of programming. Both shows lasted for hours at some point during their runs - four hours for the Grand Ole Opry and 6:30 to midnight on Saturdays for the National Barn Dance - and both became long-time staples for radio audiences across a lot of the American Midwest (and beyond). Both shows piled in the top country, bluegrass, Western, Americana, and folk artists of the day - both of this post’s feature artists were regulars on the National Barn Dance; Uncle Dave Macon (again, see previous post) was an early, if irregular, staple of the Grand Ole Opry - and larded those long time slots with skits and comedy. And, yes, Hee-Haw would follow almost the exact same path only for TV audiences (i.e,. it started as a filler for an open summer schedule and public pressure made it permanent).
It looks like the Grand Ole Opry still has regular broadcasts (didn't dig too deep), but The National Barn Dance petered out in the late 1960s. According to Wikipedia, dumb programming choices killed it before a loss of popularity had the time courtesy of ABC, the successor-owner of the property after NBC (1933-1952). Choices of phrasing make it hard to sort out exactly what happened - e.g., what does “the cancellation of the network broadcast in 1952” mean? - but live performances shut down five years later and ABC landed the coup de grace when they switched to a Top 40 rock ‘n’ roll format in 1959.
To repeat theme, both shows owed a big debt for their popularity to a combination of the mass purchase of home radios and the Great Depression. After the recording industry crashed and as the household-to-radio ratio reached 1:1 and beyond, radio became a go-to option for entertainment for a couple decades. All it took was those big-ass AM radio signals and the widespread popularity of the music to sustain country/western’s growth into a viable popular genre.
The two featured artists grew rich and famous off that boom, starting with...
Patsy Montana, Some Cowboy’s Sweetheart
Patsy Montana was born Ruby Rose Blevins in (maybe*) Beaudry, Arkansas in 1908 (* my other two sources said Hope, Arkansas and/or a couple random counties). She later changed “Ruby” to “Rubye” because, according to her Country Music Hall of Fame (hereafter, CMHoF) bio, for a twist of sophistication. Blevins found a little stage-time in Arkansas, but the beginnings of her career happened when she moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA and study (if I recall right) violin. In 1931, she won a local talent contest with either “her energetic voice and sparkling yodeling” (Wikipedia) or because she was “a skilled artist and fiddler” (CMHoF). For the record, she performed Jimmie Rodgers songs for that audition. That win landed her to a radio spot (maybe something called Hollywood Breakfast Club), where she performed as “Rubye Blevins, the Yodeling Cowgirl from San Antone.”
Blevins didn’t leave California with that stage-name. Between performing with Monte Montana, a “silent film star and world-champion roper,” and the advice of a singer/songwriter named Stuart Hamblen, she landed on Patsy Montana for a stage name. And that’s what I’ll be calling her going forward.
Those gigs appear to have dried up by the returned to Arkansas after college. She didn’t stay long. Montana’s restless legs carried her to Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair, chaperoned by her brothers, but also looking to connect with a couple pen pals of hers, who happened to be the Girls of the Golden West. Somewhere in that trip, she found time “[to audition] for a crooner’s role.” She broke into laughter halfway through the audition and after the auditioning producer “fell in love with her ‘giggle,’” he directed her to a different project: fronting a group backed by the Prairie Ramblers (originally the Kentucky Ramblers, but there was a brand to build).
The Prairie Ramblers served as Patsy Montana’s backing band through the late 1950s. She built her popularity on the back of two main things: 1) steady appearances on the National Barn Dance and, 2) making “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” (1935) her signature (yodeling) song and the first 1-million seller for any female country artist. Over a career that spanned, first, from 1933 to the late 1950s, and then picked up again from 1964 to…oh, the late 80s or so, Patsy Montana made more than 7,000 “personal appearances” - that’s according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. (Oh, and her 1964 comeback featured Waylon Jennings on lead guitar.) She appeared in at least one movie - a 1939 Western musical called Colorado Sunset, with Gene Autry - had a succession of radio shows in the late 1940, and recorded a bunch of material for several labels. Because I found it, there’s a website loosely devoted to Patsy Montana “trivia,” only it’s a bizarre dogpile of conjecture and dodgy polling (e.g., was Patsy Montana, straight, gay or bi; did she ever do drugs; was she hot or not: let the fans decide!). It’s all very fucking internet and equal parts delightful and useless for it.
Patsy Montana made it all the way to 1996. Her CMHoF bio flat-out states that she kept performing until the end. If you listen to her, I think you’ll hear why. It’s surprisingly modern material all the way down to the production and arrangement. She mined a specific theme, one that harkened back to the open frontier and the heavily-mythologized American West. Call it nostalgia and escapism delivered with Patsy Montana’s signature style. From the CMHoF:
“With her energetic voice and sparkling yodeling, and wearing her cowgirl outfit, Montana presented a cheerful image to Depression-era America. The lyrics of her great hit spoke of independence and love and the kind of freedom the cowboy had come to symbolize.”
About the Sampler
Once I accidentally got to 25 songs on the sampler for this post, I couldn’t see a good reason to pull anything out - this is for educational purposes, after all - but that left me with more than I want to link to. To flag a couple representative examples, “Old Nevada Moon” captures her sauntering swing mode, while “Back on Montana Plains” shows her riding at a faster clip (also, “I’d like to be ridin’ my old pink horse tonight”; am I hearing that right?). She delivers in a more sentimental tone in “Little Sweetheart of the Ozarks,” but returns to swinging in “Swing Time Cowgirl.” She can be sly (“Woman’s Answer to Nobody’s Darling”), or perky: her vocals have that same brightness, and the music the same warmth, across her catalog. It’s not something I hear every time, but here and there - but on “Old Nevada Moon” and "Swing Time Cowgirl," especially - she sounds a little like Dolly Parton. The style’s different, but there’s an inflection here, a rounding in her phrasing there…
Girls of the Golden West, or “Golden Girls of the West” When You Make a Typo
Sisters Mildred Fern Good and Dorothy Laverne Good were born and raised in Mt. Carmel, Illinois. Also, before going too far, I have to confess that I’m already out of material.
Nearly all the sites I found on the Girls of the Golden West (and Wikipedia gets to most of it) covered the same material - e.g., they named themselves after a Giacomo Puccini opera, they started entertaining family before getting into show-biz, after starting on St. Louis radio, they bounced to the WLS National Barn Dance, they built a fiction about hailing from Muleshoe, Texas for stage purposes, etc. I never expected the material on them to be so thin that the fact they were pen-pals with Patsy Montana feels like the big reveal for this segment.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t matter, of course, and Wikipedia credits them for inspiring later country artists like Kitty Wells, Jean Shephard and Patsy Cline. They have a pair of lovely signature songs in “Lonely Cowgirl” and (especially) “Silver Moon on the Golden Gate,” and they kept finding work, whether on TV - e.g., Renfro Valley Barn Dance and Boone County Jamboree - and they got a couple radio gigs in Cincinnati, OH after that….uh, the end.
About the Sampler
I dredged up Jo Stafford’s cover of “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” for the sampler, because Spotify didn’t have the Girls of the Golden West’s version (here it is, thank Youtube). As for the rest, it’s in the same vein as Patsy Montana’s material - lots of references to the Old West (with a dash of Mexican inspiration thrown in, repped on the sampler by “South of the Border"). Because they performed as a duet, the Girls of the Golden West’s material leans into harmony - and to good effect. Some of their numbers suffer from olde tyme recording - e.g., “Colorado Blues,” “Put Away My Little Shoes,” and “Lonely Cowgirl” (and what about that little floating fillup in the harmony?). The production picks up on most of the rest, but, in a fun, possibly imagined twist, they play mostly on the minor side. That lends their music a melancholy tone that you don’t get from, say, Patsy Montana. Also, they’re big fans of the unaccompanied guitar open, as you’ll hear on: “My Little Old Nevada Home,” “Where the Silvery Colorado Wends Its Way,” and “Tumbledown Shack of My Dreams.” They start with the same, low-pitch pluck only to add the melodic touches earlier, as in songs like “The Santa Fe Trail” and the mopey, lost-animal ballad “There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall.”
You still hear country and/or western in its infancy in these two acts. The production is miles better than what you hear from Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family (first post, again) and Uncle Dave Macon. It’s more polished structurally, even while it’s still largely stripped down for instrumentation - e.g., you don’t hear percussion, there’s not much for bass, etc. While I can’t say so with certainty, everything I've listened to suggest all that was yet to come. As noted in the first post, country has always marched to its own drummer…if only until the market tells it to try something new.
That’s it for this one.
I took a stab at a short history and light theorizing about country music in the first post in this mini-series, so I thought I’d fill that in by talking a bit about two of the iconic vehicles for popularizing the genre during the 1920s through 1940s. Those would be, in order, the National Barn Dance, which broadcast out of Chicago, Illinois, and the show that became the Grand Ole Opry, which broadcast out of Nashville. WLS-AM carried the former, WSM-AM carried the latter and both were “clear-channel” stations, 50,000 watt behemoths with almost unimaginably powerful signals in today’s radio market. As noted in the Wikipedia entry on the National Barn Dance:
“…because the clear-channel signal of WLS could be received throughout most of the Midwest and even beyond in the late evening and nighttime hours, making much of the United States (and Canada) a potential audience.”
A guy named Edgar L. Bill started the National Barn Dance in 1924 - which, incidentally, predates the alleged birth of country music, 1927’s famous Bristol Sessions (see the first post in the series) - and he started it on a hunch:
“Having lived on a farm, he knew how people loved the familiar sound and informal spirit of old-fashioned barn dance music.”
After starting as a one-off (“an impromptu sustaining program”), it became a fixture once an “avalanche of phone calls and letters” confirmed an audience existed for Bill’s kind of programming. Both shows lasted for hours at some point during their runs - four hours for the Grand Ole Opry and 6:30 to midnight on Saturdays for the National Barn Dance - and both became long-time staples for radio audiences across a lot of the American Midwest (and beyond). Both shows piled in the top country, bluegrass, Western, Americana, and folk artists of the day - both of this post’s feature artists were regulars on the National Barn Dance; Uncle Dave Macon (again, see previous post) was an early, if irregular, staple of the Grand Ole Opry - and larded those long time slots with skits and comedy. And, yes, Hee-Haw would follow almost the exact same path only for TV audiences (i.e,. it started as a filler for an open summer schedule and public pressure made it permanent).
It looks like the Grand Ole Opry still has regular broadcasts (didn't dig too deep), but The National Barn Dance petered out in the late 1960s. According to Wikipedia, dumb programming choices killed it before a loss of popularity had the time courtesy of ABC, the successor-owner of the property after NBC (1933-1952). Choices of phrasing make it hard to sort out exactly what happened - e.g., what does “the cancellation of the network broadcast in 1952” mean? - but live performances shut down five years later and ABC landed the coup de grace when they switched to a Top 40 rock ‘n’ roll format in 1959.
To repeat theme, both shows owed a big debt for their popularity to a combination of the mass purchase of home radios and the Great Depression. After the recording industry crashed and as the household-to-radio ratio reached 1:1 and beyond, radio became a go-to option for entertainment for a couple decades. All it took was those big-ass AM radio signals and the widespread popularity of the music to sustain country/western’s growth into a viable popular genre.
The two featured artists grew rich and famous off that boom, starting with...
Patsy Montana, Some Cowboy’s Sweetheart
Patsy Montana was born Ruby Rose Blevins in (maybe*) Beaudry, Arkansas in 1908 (* my other two sources said Hope, Arkansas and/or a couple random counties). She later changed “Ruby” to “Rubye” because, according to her Country Music Hall of Fame (hereafter, CMHoF) bio, for a twist of sophistication. Blevins found a little stage-time in Arkansas, but the beginnings of her career happened when she moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA and study (if I recall right) violin. In 1931, she won a local talent contest with either “her energetic voice and sparkling yodeling” (Wikipedia) or because she was “a skilled artist and fiddler” (CMHoF). For the record, she performed Jimmie Rodgers songs for that audition. That win landed her to a radio spot (maybe something called Hollywood Breakfast Club), where she performed as “Rubye Blevins, the Yodeling Cowgirl from San Antone.”
Blevins didn’t leave California with that stage-name. Between performing with Monte Montana, a “silent film star and world-champion roper,” and the advice of a singer/songwriter named Stuart Hamblen, she landed on Patsy Montana for a stage name. And that’s what I’ll be calling her going forward.
Those gigs appear to have dried up by the returned to Arkansas after college. She didn’t stay long. Montana’s restless legs carried her to Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair, chaperoned by her brothers, but also looking to connect with a couple pen pals of hers, who happened to be the Girls of the Golden West. Somewhere in that trip, she found time “[to audition] for a crooner’s role.” She broke into laughter halfway through the audition and after the auditioning producer “fell in love with her ‘giggle,’” he directed her to a different project: fronting a group backed by the Prairie Ramblers (originally the Kentucky Ramblers, but there was a brand to build).
The Prairie Ramblers served as Patsy Montana’s backing band through the late 1950s. She built her popularity on the back of two main things: 1) steady appearances on the National Barn Dance and, 2) making “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” (1935) her signature (yodeling) song and the first 1-million seller for any female country artist. Over a career that spanned, first, from 1933 to the late 1950s, and then picked up again from 1964 to…oh, the late 80s or so, Patsy Montana made more than 7,000 “personal appearances” - that’s according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. (Oh, and her 1964 comeback featured Waylon Jennings on lead guitar.) She appeared in at least one movie - a 1939 Western musical called Colorado Sunset, with Gene Autry - had a succession of radio shows in the late 1940, and recorded a bunch of material for several labels. Because I found it, there’s a website loosely devoted to Patsy Montana “trivia,” only it’s a bizarre dogpile of conjecture and dodgy polling (e.g., was Patsy Montana, straight, gay or bi; did she ever do drugs; was she hot or not: let the fans decide!). It’s all very fucking internet and equal parts delightful and useless for it.
Patsy Montana made it all the way to 1996. Her CMHoF bio flat-out states that she kept performing until the end. If you listen to her, I think you’ll hear why. It’s surprisingly modern material all the way down to the production and arrangement. She mined a specific theme, one that harkened back to the open frontier and the heavily-mythologized American West. Call it nostalgia and escapism delivered with Patsy Montana’s signature style. From the CMHoF:
“With her energetic voice and sparkling yodeling, and wearing her cowgirl outfit, Montana presented a cheerful image to Depression-era America. The lyrics of her great hit spoke of independence and love and the kind of freedom the cowboy had come to symbolize.”
About the Sampler
Once I accidentally got to 25 songs on the sampler for this post, I couldn’t see a good reason to pull anything out - this is for educational purposes, after all - but that left me with more than I want to link to. To flag a couple representative examples, “Old Nevada Moon” captures her sauntering swing mode, while “Back on Montana Plains” shows her riding at a faster clip (also, “I’d like to be ridin’ my old pink horse tonight”; am I hearing that right?). She delivers in a more sentimental tone in “Little Sweetheart of the Ozarks,” but returns to swinging in “Swing Time Cowgirl.” She can be sly (“Woman’s Answer to Nobody’s Darling”), or perky: her vocals have that same brightness, and the music the same warmth, across her catalog. It’s not something I hear every time, but here and there - but on “Old Nevada Moon” and "Swing Time Cowgirl," especially - she sounds a little like Dolly Parton. The style’s different, but there’s an inflection here, a rounding in her phrasing there…
Girls of the Golden West, or “Golden Girls of the West” When You Make a Typo
Sisters Mildred Fern Good and Dorothy Laverne Good were born and raised in Mt. Carmel, Illinois. Also, before going too far, I have to confess that I’m already out of material.
Nearly all the sites I found on the Girls of the Golden West (and Wikipedia gets to most of it) covered the same material - e.g., they named themselves after a Giacomo Puccini opera, they started entertaining family before getting into show-biz, after starting on St. Louis radio, they bounced to the WLS National Barn Dance, they built a fiction about hailing from Muleshoe, Texas for stage purposes, etc. I never expected the material on them to be so thin that the fact they were pen-pals with Patsy Montana feels like the big reveal for this segment.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t matter, of course, and Wikipedia credits them for inspiring later country artists like Kitty Wells, Jean Shephard and Patsy Cline. They have a pair of lovely signature songs in “Lonely Cowgirl” and (especially) “Silver Moon on the Golden Gate,” and they kept finding work, whether on TV - e.g., Renfro Valley Barn Dance and Boone County Jamboree - and they got a couple radio gigs in Cincinnati, OH after that….uh, the end.
About the Sampler
I dredged up Jo Stafford’s cover of “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” for the sampler, because Spotify didn’t have the Girls of the Golden West’s version (here it is, thank Youtube). As for the rest, it’s in the same vein as Patsy Montana’s material - lots of references to the Old West (with a dash of Mexican inspiration thrown in, repped on the sampler by “South of the Border"). Because they performed as a duet, the Girls of the Golden West’s material leans into harmony - and to good effect. Some of their numbers suffer from olde tyme recording - e.g., “Colorado Blues,” “Put Away My Little Shoes,” and “Lonely Cowgirl” (and what about that little floating fillup in the harmony?). The production picks up on most of the rest, but, in a fun, possibly imagined twist, they play mostly on the minor side. That lends their music a melancholy tone that you don’t get from, say, Patsy Montana. Also, they’re big fans of the unaccompanied guitar open, as you’ll hear on: “My Little Old Nevada Home,” “Where the Silvery Colorado Wends Its Way,” and “Tumbledown Shack of My Dreams.” They start with the same, low-pitch pluck only to add the melodic touches earlier, as in songs like “The Santa Fe Trail” and the mopey, lost-animal ballad “There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall.”
You still hear country and/or western in its infancy in these two acts. The production is miles better than what you hear from Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family (first post, again) and Uncle Dave Macon. It’s more polished structurally, even while it’s still largely stripped down for instrumentation - e.g., you don’t hear percussion, there’s not much for bass, etc. While I can’t say so with certainty, everything I've listened to suggest all that was yet to come. As noted in the first post, country has always marched to its own drummer…if only until the market tells it to try something new.
That’s it for this one.
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