Gene Autry – The Singing Cowboy, Chapter Two / With His Little Darlin’ Mary Lee

My father had the wrong Gene Autry album, but I played it many times. The Original Gene Autry Sings Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. The title was ambiguous: Original should have referred to the song, Autry’s best-known composition (the second-biggest selling single in history), but in my memory the word pointed toward Autry himself, as he stood on the cover straddling Santa’s sleigh, beaming a “your pal” smile. But who would ever second-guess Autry’s originality or authenticity? I never believed he was a cowboy. He was “The Singing Cowboy,” the first and the best, an American icon like Washington or Chaplin or Elvis.

Autry established a genre of country music and of film, and set borders to a mythology of the West. He was the good white settler, part noble gunfighter, part Puritan cowpoke. His films cut him as more than a hero: He was a missionary in the wilderness, celebrating the glories of nature, preaching in words and songs the values of absolute honesty and purity. “The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.” So began Autry’s Cowboy Code.

Autry — who was 91 when he passed away October 2 — began by copying Jimmie Rodgers. His early recordings, well represented on the recent Gene Autry Blues Singer 19291931 (Columbia/Legacy), are at times indistinguishable from Rodgers’ own. Comparing those early recordings to classic Autry, especially the voice of his films, is startling. Some of his best singing can be heard in films such as Carolina Moon and Blue Montana Skies.

With the advent of his B-Western career, however, his voice had been all but stripped of Rodgers’ blues. He had an enveloping, sometimes soaring tenor, and he crooned operatically, his timbre silky and stately. Like his character, his voice provided an ethical antidote both to the West’s wildness and to his morally dubious sidekicks Smiley Burnette and Pat Buttram — predictably, they sang with a scrappy country twang.

Of these two releases — technically not reissues, as the material is drawn directly from some of his 93 films — The Singing Cowboy, Chapter Two is the most satisfying artistically. With His Little Darlin’ Mary Lee is really a children’s collection, devoted as much to teen singer Mary Lee Wooters and her spunky, occasionally cloying Judy Garland-esque delivery, and a batch of light hearted charmers and novelty tunes, filled with suspect “yippie-yi-yo”s and curly-Q yodels. “Take a tune that’s nice and sappy/Sure to make everybody happy,” the cowboy chorus sings in “Whistle”, while Autry and Mary Lee provide yodeling lessons. The child star was crucial to Autry’s unprecedented success. She widened his appeal and supplied his westerns with signature father-daughter dramas or comedies, immediately accessible and psychologically comforting.

Even more than John Wayne, Gene Autry was the great romanticizer of the West. He fashioned a world no one could really believe existed, but for which millions haunted by the Depression and the war yearned. He appropriated and melded cultures, and, significantly, helped bring Mexican music into mainstream country (represented on Singing Cowboy in the lively snippets of “Rancho Grande” and “South Of The Border”). He could even capture some of the West’s enigmas, and at times he let mystery flow through his voice, past all pretense to virtue. “It’s called ‘Whirlwind’,” Autry explains of a song in the film of the same name. “It’s about the dust devils of the desert. They come from out of nowhere and they disappear into nowhere.”