Ken Maynard

Ken Maynard is not thought of, first and foremost, as a singing cowboy movie star. Yet, he is often credited, mistakenly, as the first cowboy star to sing on screen. Actually, cowboys could be seen singing and playing instruments in the silent film, The Great Train Robbery from 1903, the first Western film to have a coherent plot. Later, when talking pictures were introduced, Warner Baxter, playing the Cisco Kid, sang a few lines in In Old Arizona. That film was released in January, 1929, before Maynard made movies with sound. The following year, Ken Maynard sang in his first all-sound feature film, Mountain Justice.

The movie studio tolerated his rustic voice on the assumption that it sounded like a "real" cowboy. But Maynard's voice was such an acquired taste that he was only allowed to record four commercial sides (which are available on CD today), so he was not widely recognized as a musician by the record-buying public. Still, he was the first Western movie star to record Western music and his considerable abilities as a B-Western action hero made him one of the early super stars of the B-Western genre. By 1933, he had become the highest paid Western actor in Hollywood. And his popularity played an important role in the growth of interest in what was to become the musical Western.

Maynard loved music and was convinced early on that there was a place for it in Western movies. He played fiddle, harmonica, guitar and banjo and managed to insert songs in a number of his movies in the early 1930s. Although he arranged to play and sing in his earlier films, Maynard's 1933 film, The Strawberry Roan, has been credited as being the first full-fledged musical Western. Producer Nat Levine saw the film and was convinced by it that musical Westerns were worth pursuing. But if it had not been for Ken Maynard's persistence, and for his willingness to accept newcomer Gene Autry to sing in his film, In Old Santa Fe in 1934, the musical Western, and the development of what we know today as Western music, might well have taken a different path.