One of Hollywood’s first singing cowboys, Gene Autry, was born in 1907, near Tioga, Texas.
Autry was the best-selling country and western recording artist of the 1930s and early ’40s. When he was still a child, his family moved to Ravia, Oklahoma, and at age five, Autry began singing in the church choir.
Autry got his first guitar lessons from his mother when he was twelve, on a guitar ordered through the Sears and Roebuck catalog.
As a young man, Autry worked as a telegraph operator for the Frisco Railroad in Chelsea, Oklahoma. At the time, he took a short trip to New York after Will Rogers overheard him singing and playing guitar at work and suggested he try his luck there.
Autry’s attempts didn’t go as planned, and he soon returned to Oklahoma, where he had his performing debut in 1928 on a local radio show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, billed as Oklahoma’s Yodeling Cowboy, where he told stories and sang Jimmie Rodgers’s hit songs.
Autry’s first hit single came in 1931, “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.”
In his autobiography, “Back in the Saddle Again,” Autry described his musical beginnings.
“I was 12 when I ordered my first guitar out of the worn and discolored pages of a Sears, Roebuck catalog. The story that I bought it on the installment plan is untrue, the invention of a Hollywood press agent. Local color. I paid cash, $8, money I had saved as a hired hand on my uncle Calvin’s farm, baling and stacking hay. Prairie hay, used as feed for the cattle in winter. It was mean work for a wiry boy, but ambition made me strong.”
Autry’s recording success got him a position on the National Barn Dance radio program on WLS in Chicago, which made him nationally popular.
Then came his career as a cowboy actor, after singing a song in the film In Old Santa Fe, 1934. Autry’s first role was a year later in The Phantom Empire, and after that he starred in Tumbling Tumbleweeds and Last of the Pony Riders. His horse, Champion, and his sidekick, Smiley Burnette, usually starred with him.
Autry recorded more than 600 songs altogether, many of which he wrote or co-wrote. By 1940, he was one of the top movie and music stars in the country.
Autry’s singing cowboy character moved from radio and film to a weekly television series, The Gene Autry Show, which aired for 91 episodes on CBS from 1950 to 1956.
In 1950, while filming an episode, Pat Buttram, Gene Autry’s longtime sidekick, was seriously injured after a small prop antique cannon blew up.
Buttram returned to work, rejoining Autry as a regular on his popular CBS radio program, Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch, and was back working with Autry in the show’s second season
In 1950, Autry also established his own production company, Flying A Productions, and he became the first film star to start producing and starring in his own weekly television series. In 1960, he purchased the Los Angeles Angels baseball franchise.
Autry also owned a string of hotels, including the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, the Ocotillo Inn and Gene Autry Hotel in Palm Springs, the Sahara Inn in Chicago and the Hotel Continental in Hollywood. He also had land and oil investments throughout the country.
On October 2, 1998, Autry passed away from lymphoma at his home in Studio City, California.
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