Cowboy Capitalist
2008; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2008.0048
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoPage 28 American Book Review Cowboy Capitalist Michael Schumacher Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry Holly George-Warren Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com 480 pages; cloth, $28.00 Like most Baby Boomers, I spent countless hours of my childhood watching such television Westerns as Wagon Train, Have Gun, Will Travel, Rawhide, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Maverick, The Rifleman, and, of course, the most popular of them all, Bonanza. The Western seemed to hang on to the last traces of an adventuresome spirit and moral order, cast in a bygone era, yet teeming with timeless elements of universal human drama. It could be as politically incorrect as all hell, but what did we know? We were kids. We wore Davy Crockett (fake) coonskin caps and Gene Autry cap guns in genuine imitation leather holsters, and we made certain that the sounds of little brothers and sisters didn’t interfere with the sights and sounds of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the Lone Ranger, or the Cisco Kid, all transmitted on decisively low-def, rabbit-eared, black-and-white television. Then, we got older and forgot. Cynics might contend that it’s the mind’s way of protecting us from the dismay we’d suffer if we were reminded of a time when we, as Americans and individuals, had faith, when hearts were less easily broken by reality. Better to hurtle into the future with as little recall clutter as possible. Fortunately, we have writers like Holly GeorgeWarren to remind us of how wrong-headed this line of thinking really is. George-Warren is a masterful researcher and storyteller, and in Public Cowboy No. 1, her biography of “singing cowboy” Gene Autry, she has given us an account of a fascinating life lived at wide-open throttle (or gallop); of the American Dream fully imagined, pursued, and realized ; and, ultimately, of the evolution of the entertainment industry itself. And somehow, by the time you’ve reached the final pages of the book, you feel as if someone’s dropped a little loose change back in your pocket. That might not be faith, but it’s a decent feeling, in any event. It would be easy to suggest that Autry’s good fortune was the product of fortuitous timing, a fierce work ethic, the right connections, and a healthy spicing of fate, all judiciously blended to cater to a country grasping for hope, first in the wake of the devastating effects of the Depression, and, later, the hardships of World War II.All of this is true enough, but it was true of any number of other entertainers in the first half of the twentieth century. What made Autry different? What made him an entertainment pioneer rather than someone simply latching on to the latest trend? The answer, George-Warren suggests in her biography, might be found inAutry’s humble Oklahoma roots. From the beginning, Orvon Grover Autry (who would change his name to Gene when he started his professional career) had to find a way to make things work. His father, in a strange way, acted as a reverse role model, as an example of what not to do. DelbertAutry drifted from job to job, jail to jail, and marriage to marriage , leaving his sickly wife and children to fend for themselves. Orvon had no choice but to earn money to help with the bills, and self-discovery came along the way. He worked on the railroad, learned to play guitar, and, by initially imitating the popular recording and performing artists of the day, and making the most out of marginal talent, he began a career that would eventually place him near the top of the entertainment world. The key, George-Warren suggests, wasAutry’s ability to take a time-testedAmerican obsession—the West—and plug its nineteenth-century mythology and allure into the different elements of the following century’s popular culture. “Gene Autry embraced the tools of the twentieth century,” George-Warren writes in her introduction , “to make his way in the world—cutting phonograph records, broadcasting over the radio, appearing in motion pictures and, later, television— yet he found stardom by reinventing...
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