Sons Of The Pioneers – Songs Of The Prairie & Roy Rogers

The early 1930s was a difficult time in Southern California and throughout the country. Jobs were scarce and homes hard to secure against the threat of earthquakes, floods, and the arrival of bill collectors. Thankfully, Prohibition was over and, along with cheap beer, talkies cost as little as a dime. And then there was the free medium of radio, which aired re-created major-league baseball games, live criminal trials, and novel musical groups.

Of the half-dozen largely forgotten combos that appeared on Southern California stations at that time, easily the most successful was the Sons Of The Pioneers, who had a morning show on Warner Bros.’ Hollywood outlet, KFWB, beginning in 1934. Originally formed by Len Slye (better known by his movie name, Roy Rogers), that group included Bob Nolan (originally Robert Clarence Nobles), Bill “Slumber” Nichols, and others. Like so many groups, they gained and lost members as a result of disagreements, alternative opportunities and other considerations. Rogers left for Republic Pictures in 1936 and the Sons followed him, appearing in 31 flicks between 1935 and 1941 and another 44 between that year and 1948.

In 1934, the Sons recorded 340 songs for the Standard Recording Company, which distributed transcriptions on 12-inch discs to radio stations throughout the country. According to Rogers, the group received no royalties for those transcriptions, but they benefited indirectly from their nationwide distribution. As Lawrence Zwisohn has written in his comprehensive liner notes that accompany this five-disc collection derived from those transcriptions, these discs were even more vital than their radio broadcasts, records, and films in bringing them to the attention of a nationwide audience.

As those familiar with the output of the German label Bear Family have come to expect, this collection is impeccably engineered, carefully selected, and accompanied by helpful text, save for the omission of identifications of the Sons appearing in the accompanying photographs.

While the Sons are best remembered as performers of “Western” or “Cowboy” music, they were a versatile group of instrumentalists and singers who also skillfully and harmoniously performed many other kinds of music. Alongside “Lone Star Trail”, “Happy Roving Cowboy” and “Roundup In The Sky” are many once-familiar 19th-century spirituals such as “Old Black Joe”, “Carry Me Back To Old Virginny” and “Dese Bones Gwine To Rise Again”, as well as waltzes, schottisches, hoedowns, Louisiana stomps, nonsense songs (“Ain’t We Crazy”, “Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown”) and plain schmaltz (“Apple Blossom Time In Normandy”, “At The End Of The Lane”, “When It’s Autumn In The Hills Of California”). But there is also “Eleven More Months And Ten More Days (And I’ll Be Out Of The Calaboose)”, and the unforgettable death struggle between Abdul Abulbul Amir and his rival, Ivan Stavinsky Stavar.

The sources of many of these songs were rooted in the popular music of 19th- and early 20th-century America, but others were composed by the Pioneers themselves. Bob Nolan wrote 20 of the 151 pieces in this set, including “Tumbling Tumble Weeds”, the Sons’ highly familiar theme. Hugh Farr provided seven and his brother Karl three of the contributions to this collection.

At one time or another, there have been twenty “Sons”, and “Pioneers” were still performing in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, the ranks of the original members were thinning. Nolan, arguably the best voice and most creative songwriter, and Hugh Farr, skilled fiddler, composer and bass singer, both died in 1980. Rogers, the last of the originals, passed away only months ago.

In recent years, the format of the original Sons, including their exceptionally close harmony and their lively instrumentation, has been copied with varying degrees of success by others, most conspicuously Riders In The Sky and Sons Of The San Joaquin. Whether their music will endure as long as that of the original Sons, and whether, in these politically correct times, they would dare to play some of the music the Pioneers played for enthusiastic audiences of an earlier generation, is quite uncertain. And, for all the dedication that Bear Family has devoted to this splendid collection, so is its market among today’s buyers.