Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy

by Peter Stanfield

In this innovative take on a neglected chapter of film history, Peter Stanfield challenges the commonly held view of the singing cowboy as an ephemeral figure of fun and argues instead that he was one of the most important cultural figures to emerge out of the Great Depression.
The rural or newly urban working-class families who flocked to see the latest exploits of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and
other singing cowboys were an audience largely ignored by mainstream
Hollywood film. Hard hit by the depression, faced with the threat--and often the reality--of dispossession and dislocation, pressured to adapt to new ways of living, these small-town filmgoers saw their ambitions, fantasies, and desires embodied in the singing cowboy and their social and political circumstances dramatized in "B" Westerns.
Stanfield traces the singing cowboy's previously uncharted roots in the performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy and its literary antecedents in dime novels, magazine fiction, and the novels of B. M. Bower, showing how silent cinema conventions, the developing commercial music media, and the prevailing conditions of film production shaped the "horse opera" of the 1930s. Cowboy songs offered an alternative to the disruptive modern effects of jazz music, while the series Western--tapping into aesthetic principles shunned by the aspiring middle class--emphasized stunts, fist fights, slapstick comedy, disguises, and hidden identities over narrative logic and character psychology. Singing cowboys also linked recording, radio, publishing, live performance, and film media.
Entertaining and thought-provoking, Horse Opera recovers not only the forgotten cowboys of the 1930s but also their forgotten the ordinary men and women
 

Genres: Film

177 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2002

About the author

Peter Stanfield is a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the author of Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail.

Reviews

[Whitney Borup · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is an interesting subject and one that deserves more analysis than is given in this book. This serves as more of an introduction to the genre, focusing on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and skipping over people like Herb Jeffries (which is weird, since he spends a lot of time talking about the Singing Cowboy as a kind of minstrel performer and where black face is used in the most popular of the singing cowboy films). The best part of the book is the last sentence: "The post-war Westerns addressed a different set of anxieties and desires--and that is another story." It's clear that Stanfield really loves these movies and studying these movies, I just wish there was more here.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like his previous book on 1930s Westerns, Stanfield argues here that film critics are way off-base when they define the real Western as the A-list pictures—Stagecoach, Liberty Valance, The Searchers—and dismiss Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and the other singing cowboys as somehow not real. Stanfield shows that Autry's westerns were hugely popular, and that the singing was part of what they loved. The book goes on to discuss how singing cowboy films drew on folk songs, dime novels and minstrel shows to create a world that had tremendous appeal to rural and newly urban audiences. This is a little dry and academic in tone, but it's very interesting, and I'm not even a Western fan.