The last strum of a special musical era has been played, and silence has fallen over the prairie. The fiddles and guitars and harmonicas are silent and the yodeling voices are but echoes in the canyon of memories. We have lived to see the passing of the last of the Great Singing Cowboys, who once trail-herded one of the most popular forms of movie entertainment in the 1930s and 40s, until television stilled their voices. They have ridden proudly away to that Final Roundup in the Sky, but these Stetsoned heroes leave behind, for those young enough to remember, a melodic, happy memory of a simpler time and place, when movies and movie-goers were still innocent.
Celebrities die in threes, or so the legend goes.
That left the reins of the singing cowboy in the hands of Gene Autry, who had also symbolized the era of the Singing Cowboy and then had gone on to even greater entreprenual success by investing his fortune in hotels, real estate, broadcasting and ownership of the California Angels baseball team. But he also heard, at the age of 91, the clarion call and rode off into the sunset on March 4 to ride drag on the Last Roundup. All three movie heroes belonged to a very specific time at the movies, when good and evil were clearly delineated and a young woman's heart, broken by a ruthless landgrabber holding a phony deed to her property, could be mended by a song from the lips of a stranger riding through. In keeping with the formula of the singing-cowboy genre, that stranger would set aside his guitar just long enough to slap leather and expose the landgrabber for what he really was and then ride off singing his praise for the spirituality of the American West. After serving in the Pacific, Autry returned to find that Roy Rogers had assumed the number one position at Republic.