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This Week in Texas Music History: Gene Autry


by Stephen Becker 2 Oct 2009 4:19 PM

This week, Texas music scholar Gary Hartman looks at the life and career of Gene Autry, the owner of the first gold album in country music history.
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Art&Seek presents This Week in Texas Music History. Every week, we’ll spotlight a different moment and the musician who made it. This week, Texas music scholar Gary Hartman looks at  the life and career of Gene Autry, the owner of the first gold album in country music history.

You can also hear This Week in Texas Music History on Saturday on KERA radio. But subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss an episode. And our thanks to KUT public radio in Austin for helping us bring this segment to you.

And if you’re a music lover, be sure to check out Track by Track, the bi-weekly podcast from Paul Slavens, host of KERA radio’s 90.1 at Night.

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This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll celebrate a Texas singer who earned the first gold album in country music history.

Orvon “Gene” Autry was born near Tioga, Texas, on September 29, 1907.  He started as a Jimmie Rodgers impersonator and a so-called “hillbilly” singer before scoring his 1931 hit “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.”  The record sold more than a million copies and earned Autry the first gold album in country music history.  By 1934, he had landed a minor role in Ken Maynard’s western In Old Santa Fe.  Soon, Autry was starring in the first of nearly 100 feature films.  By far, the most popular movie cowboy of his era, Autry set the standard for other Hollywood cowboys to follow.  As his film career skyrocketed, Autry abandoned his earlier stage persona as a southern hillbilly and started wearing elaborate western outfits that were better suited to the romantic Texas cowboy image he had adopted.  He also began expanding his musical repertoire to include more cowboy songs, as well as tunes that featured Spanish lyrics or Texas-Mexican borderland themes.

Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll learn about we’ll honor a popular artist who stopped making records in order to protest the unfair treatment of his fellow black musicians.

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About Stephen Becker

Stephen Becker produces the shows Think and Anything You Ever Wanted to Know for KERA. As part of the Art&Seek team, Stephen produces radio and digital stories, along with the podcast "The Big Screen," with Chris Vognar, movie critic of The Dallas Morning News. View more about Stephen Becker.

COMMENTS

  • Angus Wynne

    Good article, great subject–I attended “The Cowboy”‘s 100th birthday celebration at his museum in Hyde Park two years ago and learned much more about his life than I’d ever imagined–fascinating!

    My only quibble with the article is the mention of Autry’s “first gold album” in 1931–a good 17 years before the first LP was ever sold. More likely it was a 78 RPM single whose popularity was heavily boosted from jukebox plays as well as radio exposure.