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Horse Opera
The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy
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Book Presentation:
In this innovative take on a neglected chapter of film history, Peter Stanfield challenges the commonly held view of the singing cowboy as an ephemeral figure of fun and argues instead that he was one of the most important cultural figures to emerge out of the Great Depression.The rural or newly urban working-class families who flocked to see the latest exploits of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, andother singing cowboys were an audience largely ignored by mainstreamHollywood film. Hard hit by the depression, faced with the threat--and often the reality--of dispossession and dislocation, pressured to adapt to new ways of living, these small-town filmgoers saw their ambitions, fantasies, and desires embodied in the singing cowboy and their social and political circumstances dramatized in "B" Westerns.
Stanfield traces the singing cowboy's previously uncharted roots in the performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy and its literary antecedents in dime novels, magazine fiction, and the novels of B. M. Bower, showing how silent cinema conventions, the developing commercial music media, and the prevailing conditions of film production shaped the "horse opera" of the 1930s. Cowboy songs offered an alternative to the disruptive modern effects of jazz music, while the series Western--tapping into aesthetic principles shunned by the aspiring middle class--emphasized stunts, fist fights, slapstick comedy, disguises, and hidden identities over narrative logic and character psychology. Singing cowboys also linked recording, radio, publishing, live performance, and film media.
Entertaining and thought-provoking, Horse Opera recovers not only the forgotten cowboys of the 1930s but also their forgotten audiences: the ordinary men and women whose lives were brightened by the sights and songs of the singing Western.
About the Author:
Peter Stanfield, a senior lecturer in media arts at SouthamptonInstitute, England, is the author of Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail.
Press Reviews:
"This is a pioneering work of scholarship. . . . a serious and sustained look at the world of the singing cowboy of the 1930s. Peter Stanfield brings to this neglected material a wealth of knowledge of American popular music and other cultural traditions. . . . His book will decisively affect future histories of the Western."--Edward Buscombe, author of The Searchers
See the publisher website: University of Illinois Press
> From the same author:
Dirty Real (2024)
Exile on Hollywood and Vine with the Gin Mill Cowboys
Subject: Countries > United States
Hoodlum Movies (2018)
Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972
Maximum Movies - Pulp Fictions (2011)
Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson
'Un-American' Hollywood (2007)
Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era
by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield
Subject: History of Cinema
Body And Soul (2005)
Jazz And Blues In American Film, 1927-63
Mob Culture (2005)
Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film
Dir. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet and Peter Stanfield
Subject: Genre > Gangster films
> On a related topic:
The Hero's Trail (2022)
Myth and Art in the American Western, 1903–1953
Cowboy Politics (2017)
Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns from The Virginian to Unforgiven and Deadwood
Hollywood's West (2008)
The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History
by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor
How the West Was Sung (2007)
Music in the Westerns of John Ford
He Was Some Kind of a Man (2009)
Masculinities in the B Western
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