Born on a cattle farm near Tioga, Texas, son of a livestock dealer and horse trader, Gene Autry really was raised as a western cowboy, a role he lived on radio and in many films and television shows. Although his early dream was to be a telegraph operator and work on the railroad, Autry loved music. His preacher grandfather had taught him to sing at age 5, putting him in his church's choir, and Autry saved up to buy his first guitar at the age of 12. By the age of 15 he was singing and playing his guitar all over town. Will Rogers heard him sing as a teenager and encouraged him to pursue a radio career singing music. Autry didn't rush right into radio, but he did travel with the Fields Brothers' Marvelous Medicine Show, playing as the lead-in act to attract the audience so that "Professor" Fields could sell his patent medicines. He earned a hearty $15 a week for his work.

Radio Years

Autry was a teenager when radio came to Tioga. He taught himself to make his own crystal set from reading magazine articles. After he had saved up some money, he decided to take Will Rogers's advice and look into radio for his chance to sing professionally. He figured the best way would be to first cut a record, which would be his ticket through the door of radio stations. After a month in New York, he was finally given the chance to cut a test for Victor records.

He was told that he had a good voice but needed some seasoning in front of a microphone. The Victor producers recommended he spend some time on the radio and gave him a letter of recommendation to take to radio stations, something that was probably unnecessary given that many rural radio stations would let almost anyone on the air in the 1920s. Autry used the letter to land his first radio spot, a daily 15-minute show on KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1929. He was known as the Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy. He worked for the railroad by day, because the radio job was unpaid, and used his on-air publicity to land singing engagements wherever he could find them. During that time, he also began to write his own music.

After six months, Autry returned to New York in the fall of 1929 and cut records for Victor; Columbia's Velvatone label; and the Conqueror label of American Record Corporation, with whom he signed an exclusive contract. As a result of these record connections, he was later invited to appear on Rudy Vallee's Fleischmann Yeast Hour, one of his first network engagements. He was also invited to be on the National Barn Dance on Chicago station WLS. National Barn Dance was one of the most important venues for early country music. Other performers who frequented the WLS "Cornstalk Studio" from which the show originated included Pat But­ tram, Lulubelle and Scotty, The Prairie Ramblers, Patsy Mon­ tana, the Cumberland Ridgerunners, and Jolly Joe Kelly. They performed what was known as "hillbilly" music in the 1':J20S and 1930s but which later became known as "country and western," due in part to the likes of Autry and other "singing cowboys."

These early appearances led to Autry's becoming a regular on the National Barn Dance, where he was paid $35 a week for performing on-air and touring with the show. The show world tour county fairs and the like during the week and return to Chicago for the Saturday night radio show, which was performed in front of a live audience of around 1,200. The cast would do two of these live radio shows in a night. One hour of the show was aired on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Autry had by 1931 become a WLS regular. His role included singing on the radio program and touring with the company for performances. Sears and Roebuck also sponsored him for a show using his own name, the Gene Autry Program, and he was a guest artist on other shows, including the National Farm and Home Hour.

Recording Success

  Integral to Autry's network success was his recording success. One of his early recordings, "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine," became his first hit (he had written it with a coworker on the railroad). After it was recorded for distribution by the Sears mail-order catalogue, it sold 30,000 copies the first month. By the end of a year, it had sold half a million copies. The head of his record company and his press agent together had a gold-plated copy of the record made. When sales topped r million, they gave him a second gold record. In his autobiography, Back in the Saddle Again, Autry says that this was the start of the tradition of giving gold records for sales of 500,000 copies. The record sold over 5 million copies by 1940.

Other songs that made Autry a top-selling country star included "Tumbling Tumbleweed," "Back in the Saddle Again," "Mexicali Rose," "Peter Cottontail," "Here Comes Santa Claus," and "South of the Border." The song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" took Autry to the top of the pop charts for the first time when it was released in 1949. It is one of the best-selling singles of all time. Overall, Autry recorded more than 600 songs, some 200 of which he wrote or co-wrote.

Managing the Show

  Keeping a band together was difficult in the early 1930s; performers regularly left to pursue other opportunities. This meant regularly searching for talent to replace those who moved on. In one instance, Autry's booking agent, J.L. Frank, was traveling in central Illinois in 1933 when he heard a man by the name of Lester "Smiley" Burnett sing on radio station WDZ out of Tuscola, Illinois. He told Autry that Burnett would be a good addition to the show for his personal appearances. Autry called Burnett at the radio station and offered him the job sight unseen. Burnett responded, "I'm getting 18 dollars a week and getting it regular," a modest salary, but one to be thankful for in the early Depression years. Autry offered him $35 dollars a week, and Burnett accepted. Burnett would go on to back up Autry on radio, co-write songs with him, and then star in 60 movies as Autry's sidekick.

Although few band members stayed with Autry through the years, similar stories show how he often went about finding them: once, Autry saw a man hitchhiking and carrying a guitar. He pulled over and asked the fellow to play for him. He didn't hire the hitchhiker, but he got the name of "the best fiddle player in the county" from the man and hired the fiddle player.

While Autry was at WLS, the station was sold to a national network, further advancing Autry's fame beyond Chicago to other cities around the country. Autry was still at WLS in 1934 when he began his film-acting career in earnest by starring in a series of westerns. After making a few films in Hollywood, he returned to Chicago during a winter storm. Suddenly, he realized that California looked much more appealing, and when another offer for a movie came in 193 5, he left Chicago for good. He made eight films a year from 1935 to 1942. By 1953, when he starred in his last movie, he had been in 93 films.

Autry's Melody Ranch

  In 1940 Autry made a movie called Melody Ranch. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) then gave him a new radio show called Gene Autry's Melody Ranch. The program would last from 1940 to 1956, interrupted only by Autry's military service during World War II. The program included a mix of barn dance, vaudeville, Saturday matinee, and medicine show; there was even a role for his movie co-star, his horse Champion. Autry toured extensively with the show, broadcasting it from many of the small towns and rural locations where his country-style music had its greatest appeal.

In 1941, the second year of the show, Melody Ranch received an invitation to perform in the small town of Berwyn, Oklahoma. The town's 227 residents invited Autry because they had decided to change the town's name to Gene Autry, Oklahoma. The show was performed on a flatbed railroad car to a live audience of 35,000 people who had come to the small town that day. This was in addition to the CBS radio audience and a makeshift network audience put together over several Oklahoma radio stations that carried an extended version of the broadcast.

About a month later, Autry was set to start the show at the CBS studios in Hollywood when, instead of the opening theme, a special news bulletin was announced from New York. The report gave the details of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II. The show went on as usual that night after the news bulletin, but seven months later Gene Autry enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps during a live Melody Ranch show, one of several efforts he made to promote the war effort.

     Autry decided to enlist, knowing that he was ripe for the draft anyway. In July 1942 he enlisted as a G.I., cutting his pay from $600,000 the year before to $2,000 in his first year in uniform. He initially worked to entertain many of the troops and even performed many of his Melody Ranch shows from the base while stationed in Phoenix, Arizona. He eventually made it into flight school and became a pilot in the Air Transport Command, flying in the Pacific theater of the war. Once the war ended, he returned to the Melody Ranch program and to the movies.

     Guests on other episodes of Gene Autry's Melody Ranch included First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and a baby boy named Franklin Delano Gene Autry Johnston after both the president of the United States and the host of the radio show. One group of back-up musicians who played regularly for Autry's radio show was the Jimmy Wakeley Trio, a group that also appeared in one movie with Autry, Heart of the Rio Grande.

     The show, sponsored by Wrigley's Doublemint gum, sometimes promoted the spearmint version of that product. The company had assured Autry that they didn't have to worry about ratings as long as the program sold gum. Nevertheless, after the show had reached the 10-year mark, Wrigley's hired additional writers, singers, actors, orchestra members, and a publicity agent-all in an effort to stem any defection of audience to the upcoming medium of television.

     Because Autry saw the trends moving toward television, 1950 also marked the beginning of his own television series, The Gene Autry Show. The show continued for the duration of Autry's Melody Ranch radio program, also ending in 1956. By the time it ended, about 100 episodes of the television program had been made. Autry began to withdraw from personally performing in show business in the late 1950s. He had already made his last film, and in 1956 he ended his regular radio and television shows. He still recorded music regularly until 1962, but after that he concentrated on managing a growing entertainment corporation. He recorded his last two songs in 1964. Autry's autobiography, titled after one of his most popular films, Back in the Saddle Again, was published in 1978.

Ownership and Awards

By 1950 Autry was also a radio station owner, having pur­chased his first property a few years earlier, during World War II, when he was stationed near Phoenix. This Phoenix station, KPHO-AM, became the cornerstone of a corporate entertainment company that he called Golden West Broadcasting. Before incorporating, however, Autry ran the station with a partner, Tom Chauncey, who continued to run the station when Autry was transferred away. The partners also bought a radio station in Tucson. Soon Autry moved into television ownership also when he obtained a broadcast license from the Federal Communications Commission for KOOL in Phoenix. Autry owned KOOL-TV as well as KOOL radio interests until the early 1980s, when he sold them for $35 million.

     In 1952 Autry purchased 56 percent of KMPC-AM radio in Los Angeles, which became the flagship station for Golden West Broadcasting. The corporation soon bought stations up and down the Pacific coast in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. The adult alternative KSCA-FM in Los Angeles was added to the group later. Golden West owned television stations as well, including KTLA in Los Angeles, bought from Paramount for $12 million in 1964. In 1985, Autry's company sold KTLA for $45 million, the highest price paid for a television station at that time.

     Autry is the only entertainer to have five stars on the Hollywood walk of fame-one each for recordings, television, film, radio, and theater. Autry received many other awards, including the Songwriters Guild Life Achievement Award and the Hubert H. Humphrey Humanitarian of the Year award. He has been inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Western Music Association Hall of Fame, among others.