Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders

191 Pages·2011·0.9 MB·English

by  Alvin H. Marill

Television Westerns
Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs,
Scalawags, and Sidewinders
Alvin H. Marill
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
2011
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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.scarecrowpress.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2011 by Alvin H. Marill
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marill, Alvin H.
Television westerns : six decades of sagebrush sheriffs, scalawags, and sidewinders /
Alvin H. Marill.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8132-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8133-4 (ebook)
1. Western television programs—United States. I. Title.
PN1992.8.W4M38 2011
791.45'65878—dc22 2011005194
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Foreword Jon Burlingame v
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Chapter 1 Defending Range Justice on the Tube 1
Chapter 2 The Gene and Roy Era 7
Chapter 3 The Western Disney-Style and the Pivotal Years 21
Chapter 4 Coming of Age on the TV Frontier 37
Chapter 5 F rom Wagon Train and Bonanza to The Virginian
and The Big Valley 53
Chapter 6 The Made-for-TV Western Saddles Up 101
Chapter 7 The Great Western Miniseries 131
Chapter 8 Western Pilots 137
Chapter 9 Cartoon Westerns 147
Chapter 10 Western Documentaries 151
Chapter 11 Western-Themed Series Episodes 159
iii
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iv (cid:2) Contents
Chapter 12 Heading, Alas, Thataway 163
Selected Bibliography 165
Index 167
About the Author 177
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Foreword
The television Westerns . . . how we miss them. No one who grew up in
the fifties, sixties, or seventies could forget what an impact they had on our
young lives. Taming the lawlessness of Dodge City . . . riding along on a
cattle drive . . . discovering the diversity of folks on a wagon train crossing
the Great Plains . . . following the lives of family members on ranches in
Wyoming or Nevada or the Arizona Territory.
The Western speaks to Americans in a particular way: our rebellious
spirit, our sense of adventure, our love of the land, our longing to see and
traverse those mountains, rivers, and plains that were a part of the pioneer
experience—and to imagine what it must have been like in those more
primitive and rambunctious times as our young country was finding its way.
The TV Western was our guide. It may not always have been realistic
(finding solutions to troubling problems in thirty- and sixty-minute time
blocks) or accurate (negative stereotyping of nonwhites that took years to
correct), but nobody can say it wasn’t entertaining. Just thinking about that
era brings literally dozens of great theme songs to mind.
Nobody thinks of the William Tell Overture as the start of a Rossini op-
era anymore. It’s now The Lone Ranger theme. (Leonard Bernstein himself
admitted it in the very first televised Young People’s Concert in 1958.) And
while the song’s long radio history is undoubtedly partly responsible, it is the
widely seen, televised adventures of Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels that,
more than anything, crystallized those thirty seconds of classical music in the
v
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vi (cid:2) Foreword
minds of millions as the aural signature of a mysterious masked man righting
wrongs in the Old West.
And that was just the beginning. The singing cowboys brought their own
tunes to the small screen—Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again,” Roy
Rogers and Dale Evans’s “Happy Trails”—and one frontier adventurer was re-
sponsible for the first TV theme to hit number one on the record charts: “The
Ballad of Davy Crockett,” a clever narrative device suggested by Walt Disney
himself for the Fess Parker shows on the series Frontierland at Disneyland.
The popularity of those early themes helped to motivate producers search-
ing for just the right song to introduce their Western heroes to television
audiences. They encouraged songwriters to create faux cowboy ballads,
thus giving us the memorable vocal themes for Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson,
Rawhide, The Rebel, Daniel Boone, Branded, and the Warner Bros. group of
Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Maverick, and Bronco, among others.
Just as often, however, producers would opt for an instrumental theme,
asking their composers to take the orchestral-Americana approach pioneered
by Aaron Copland in the concert hall and Jerome Moross (The Big Country)
at the movies. The result was memorable big-sky, wide-open-spaces themes
like Moross’s own Wagon Train, Percy Faith’s The Virginian, Herschel Burke
Gilbert’s The Rifleman, George Duning’s The Big Valley, and Jerrold Immel’s
How the West Was Won.
Guitars, banjos, and harmonicas were heard so often that one wonders
whether their prominent place in TV Westerns was partially responsible for
kids getting hooked on folk music and rock ’n’ roll. David Rose’s arrange-
ment of the Bonanza theme—one of the rare instances in which lyrics were
written but never heard on the show itself, only later on records—and his
own High Chaparral theme were among the classic melodies to feature guitars,
both electric and acoustic, to suggest the flavor of the Old West.
Later, of course, producers searching for greater degrees of authenticity
would trim back their orchestras to feature just a handful of colorful, ap-
propriately Western instruments: the fiddles, bluesy guitars, and Jew’s harp
of Paradise; the guitars and harmonica of The Young Riders; and the fiddle,
harmonium, guitars, and unusual percussion of Deadwood.
And sometimes that desired authenticity extended to the choice of vocal-
ist. Veteran Frankie Laine sang several themes, from Rawhide and Gunslinger
to Rango and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. Country singers Johnny Cash
(The Rebel), Johnny Western (Have Gun—Will Travel), Ed Bruce (Bret Mav-
erick), Waylon Jennings (The Dukes of Hazzard), and Clint Black (Harts of
the West) have all lent their voices—and sometimes, their acting skills—to
weekly series.
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Foreword (cid:2) vii
Al Marill’s wide-ranging, nostalgic chronicle ferrets out many obscure
Westerns that also had first-rate music—music that is unfortunately forgotten
simply because the shows themselves didn’t last. Many were penned by some
of the most distinguished composers of Hollywood and Broadway: Riverboat
(Elmer Bernstein), Outlaws (Hugo Friedhofer), The Great Adventure (Richard
Rodgers), Wide Country (John Williams), The Loner (Jerry Goldsmith), The
Men from Shiloh (Ennio Morricone), and Cade’s County (Henry Mancini), to
name just a few. The great Bernard Herrmann, who scored numerous Alfred
Hitchcock classics, wrote several remarkable dramatic scores for TV Westerns,
including Have Gun—Will Travel; Gunsmoke; The Virginian; and Cimarron Strip.
What might be termed “revisionist” Westerns boasted some of the more
offbeat themes of the genre, starting with the jazz scores of Shotgun Slade and
extending to the irreverent song of F Troop (“where Indian fights are color-
ful sights and nobody takes a lickin’ / where paleface and redskin both turn
chicken”); the lighthearted instrumental The Wild Wild West; the mystical
Kung Fu; and the boldly retro Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Marill also reviews dozens of made-for-TV movies and miniseries in the
Western genre, and a surprising number have truly memorable music worthy
of concert-hall performance. Chief among them is Basil Poledouris’s Emmy-
winning effort for the eight-hour Lonesome Dove, among the finest folk-
influenced Americana scores ever written for the small screen. Several of
the best of these scores take on an elegiac tone, as if to mourn the end of the
frontier and simpler times: Bruce Broughton’s Emmy-nominated True Women,
Craig Safan’s music for the Custer retelling Son of the Morning Star, and Jerry
Fielding’s for-the-frontier-tracker saga Mr. Horn. In a more traditional vein
were John Addison’s Centennial, Lee Holdridge’s Buffalo Girls, and Bob Cob-
ert’s Western Heritage Award–winning Last Ride of the Dalton Gang.
Among movies and minis that focused on Native American themes,
Gerald Fried’s Emmy-nominated score for the epic The Mystic Warrior
drew on authentic Sioux chants and instruments for verisimilitude. Patrick
Williams’s Geronimo and Charles Fox’s The Broken Chain offered similarly
dramatic takes on the traditional sounds of those who made the West their
home long before the white man. Many of these orchestral scores rank
among the most impressive music ever written for television.
So as you pore over the following pages, recalling the great (and some not-
so-great) sagebrush sagas of television history, take a moment to remember
the music that accompanied them. I’m betting that you’ll be humming some
of your favorite Western themes.
—Jon Burlingame
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viii (cid:2) Foreword
Jon Burlingame writes about film and television music for Variety and lec-
tures on the subject at the University of Southern California. He is the
author of TV’s Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes from “Dragnet” to
“Friends” and Sound and Vision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks.
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Acknowledgments
To Vincent Terrace, Jon Burlingame, Mort Chenvenson, Jane Klain and
the folks at the Paley Center for Media, and the Broadcast Pioneers of
Philadelphia—silver spurs and a tip of the Stetson.
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