There were, as the late country singer David Houston told a Texas reporter, even occasions where the pre-stardom Autry played guitar behind Austin. Autry would have a hit with the self-penned “You’re The Only Star In My Blue Heaven”, and he actually sold more records in the Austin-influenced pop mode than with most of the sagebrush songs out of the movies. Autry would write that Austin “was always a very kind person, especially to a newcomer…a close personal friend, and without a doubt one of the finest artists I ever knew.”
Austin took advantage of this crooning cowboy trend himself by penning songs such as “Give Me A Home In Oklahoma” and “Rootin’ Shootin’ Tootin’ Man From Texas”. But the early ’30s were dominated, for him, by a Hollywood career, performing in Sadie Mckee with Joan Crawford and in Klondike Annie with his far-from-down-home friend Mae West, for whom he wrote songs such as “I’m An Occidental Woman In An Oriental Mood For Love”.
At the same time, Gene was developing close relationships with some of the leading African-American lights of the emerging swing sound. Fats Waller was now a close Austin friend and partner; he wrote “Ain’t Misbehavin'” for Gene after Austin bailed him out of jail in New York, where Waller was being held for failure to pay alimony. Austin recorded that classic and also “Rollin’ Down The River” before Fats did himself; he also included Waller in then-rare racially integrated recording sessions, and got him signed to Victor Records. Austin also worked with swing arranger Fletcher Henderson and, uncredited, as researchers Don Peak and Tor Magnusson have shown, provided Duke Ellington words for the vocal version of “Mood Indigo”.
Austin’s own live and recorded singing career was less hot at this point but still a working operation, often featuring the sophisticated, stripped-down bass and guitar backing of a talented pair called Coco and Candy. Of lead guitarist Otto (“Coco”) Heimel, Austin would say, with some reason, “it was this man from whom, in my opinion, all the great guitar players…learned.” Candy (Johnny Candido) would later be the voice of countless singing characters in Walt Disney and Ralph Bakshi feature cartoons. This ritzy Gene Austin often appeared in a top hat and tails, just like a sly singer of the same day who showed more than a touch of the wistful Austin approach — Fred Astaire.
Austin was southern enough to miss the region, so he and second wife Agnes relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, in the mid-’30s, and named their daughter Charlotte for the place. (As an adult actress, Charlotte Austin would star with Marlon Brando in the Napoleon bioflick Desiree.)
As Roy Acuff was recording “Great Speckle Bird” and the eastern end of country music was becoming increasingly focused on songs of sin and redemption, North Carolinian Austin was joining Mae West in Klondike Annie (a send-up of hustlers passing for evangelists in the Alaskan Gold Rush) and cavorting in Harlem with Louie and Fats. Though Roy Acuff’s publishing partner Fred Rose had been a Gene Austin crony back in New York, Austin’s territory could not, in 1936, have seemed further from mainstream country music. But in the Texas-to-Louisiana Third Coast where Austin started, his impact within the more swinging reaches of country was actually growing.
As Bob Wills chronicler Rich Kienzle has noted, Austin’s vocals were already a special favorite of that young Texan in the ’20s; the vocal style and range were right within his reach. If the more complex styles of Crosby and urban or rural blues artists were adopted in the great western swing vocals of Milton Brown and Tommy Duncan, Wills himself always had some of that high, wistful Austin sound in his singing, very noticeable in early outings such as “Mexicali Rose” and the sentimental ballad “Old-Fashioned Love”. Wills’ Texas Playboys and Brown’s Brownies both started off incorporating strong elements of the pop that Austin’s records had helped make the standard.
Steel guitar master Leon McAuliffe told an oral history project in the ’80s that as the Playboys’ sound became more sophisticated, Wills had McAuliffe and guitar ace Eldon Shamblin listen to Austin records, among just a few others, to hear where the sound should go next. Those records would have featured the piano, bass, and sophisticated, chorded guitar sound of Austin with Coco and Candy — material such as “Blue Sky Avenue”, which the trio performed in the 1934 movie Gift Of Gab. Later in the ’30s, both Wills and Cliff Bruner’s Texas Wanderers would make Austin’ first big hit “Yearning” a western swing standard.
The Austin vocal honey was having an impact on emerging country sounds well beyond western swing and crooning cowboys. Jimmie Davis, soon famous for “You Are My Sunshine” and getting elected governor of Austin’s home state of Louisiana, started out with a slavish cover of Austin’s huge hit “Ramona”.
Shreveport manager, booker, composer and bass player Tillman Franks, who worked with everyone from Hank Williams to Elvis Presley and came to know Gene Austin, too, suggested in an interview for this article that, through his direct influence on Davis, “Gene Austin helped start country music. Jimmie Davis’ first records were imitating Austin as often as they were Jimmie Rodgers.”
Up in Canada, another country mainstreamer, who would name his only son after Jimmie Rodgers, was listening closely to Austin, too. Franks recalls Hank Snow showing up at a Gene Austin show in Medford, Oregon, in the late 1960s and declaring that “way back then in the ’30s, his hero was Gene Austin. He couldn’t believe he was getting to meet him. Snow was usually standoffish, but he followed Gene around like a little kid! Gene couldn’t get rid of him; he was the one that had inspired him.”
Snow describes this encounter in his own 1994 autobiography, adding that Austin was astonished when Snow sang him his own old song, “I’m Coming Home”, one of several Austin numbers Snow had written down and saved in the ’30s from radio transcriptions he’d had access to while on the air in Halifax.
Austin’s closest encounter with cowboy crooning came when he starred, in 1938, in a limited release movie called Songs And Saddles — riding a horse, singing cowboy numbers. Ironically, many apparently showed up for this picture thinking they were going to see Gene Autry; only a few years before, Austin told Tommy Overstreet, Autry had asked for his blessing to use such a similar name. (Autry had been born Orvon Grover Autry, after all, not Gene or even Eugene.) Characteristically unpossessive, Austin had said, “If the confusion helps you reach a few more people, go for it!”
A bit paunchy in the movie at 38, Austin spends more time chasing bad guys on a live-in tour bus than on a horse. Such elaborate motor homes, inevitably dubbed “The Blue Heaven”, would often be his real home from this point on — whether they were parked in Louisiana, Las Vegas or Hollywood. The fast-living Austin, Overstreet says, liked to live in a style where he could leave town fast.
Songs And Saddles was presented as a “road show” attraction, booked into individual small towns from Texas to Virginia, with Austin playing live at the same performance. Audiences in these places, usually ignored entirely by uptown pop artists, responded well, even though there had not been many very recent hits from Austin.
