Crooners and Cowboys:

How 1930s American Sensibility Was Shaped by Vocal Tracks

The Great Depression offers interesting leads in gauging the value of fun and entertainment during hard times. When it comes to explaining this decade in Hollywood’s history, escapism and fantasy are the most widespread definitions, often accompanied by a substratum of disdain. However, if we consider that the trust moviegoers placed in Hollywood films would never be equaled in the years that followed, we should more deeply examine the reasons behind this great success, perhaps choosing escapism as one of its major causes. Morris Dickstein points out that “the fantasy culture of the 1930s was all about movement”, a movement shaking off the doldrums of Depression, as a burst of energy against the fake mobility of rambling and hoboing. Consider, for instance, the importance of dynamism in many products of the decade, from the physical movements in Astaire and Rogers’s romantic fairytales to the aural boost of Tin Pan Alley popular songs: even expressing different sorts of dynamism, both contained the same daring confidence, the same flaunted buoyancy. The quick and clever badinage of romantic couples – whether formed by Astaire and Rogers, Grant and Dunne, or Powell and Loy – furnished a real escape from every form of life’s commitment, burden or pressure. Those products were clear responses to the need to break free from everyday routines, anxieties about economic stagnation, lack of jobs, and shadowy projections of an uncertain future. Their freewheeling spirit may have been ephemeral, but sufficient to cheer people up, give them a moment of joy or provide vicarious access to the secret world of the very rich, representing, at the end, the underpinning of the entire decade’s culture. 

Lip-synching secret emotions 

Amid the many films that later tried to reproduce the 1930s spirit and sensibility, one is particularly relevant for its emphasis on how the aural dimension could foster inner dynamism. Originally a BBC mini-series written by Dennis Potter, Pennies From Heaven (Herbert Ross, 1981) demonstrates how much ordinary people valued the vicarious experience offered by songs and vocal tracks, centered on daydreaming or self-scrutiny, from which they could find support and solace. In this movie, set in the 1930s, the characters lip-synched their most intimate selves to songs, vicariously using the singers’ voices to soothe their nerves, express hidden truths, or reveal shameful feelings. In the opening scene, the sheet-music salesman Arthur Parker (Steve Martin), frustrated by his frigid wife, resorts to the lyrics of I’ll Never Have to Dream Again to express his resentment, lip-synching the voice of a woman, the singer Connie Boswell, who sang the song in 1932. The scene functions as a flip-side, magnifying the song’s significance against a backdrop of dreariness: early in the morning, while still in bed, Arthur tries a first sexual approach to his wife that is amply declined; he follows her in the bathroom where, suddenly, observing the banal act of brushing teeth, he starts to sing I’ll Never Have to Dream Again. The lyrics are beyond any doubt explicit about what his wishes and desires are: “If I should wake and find your arms around me / I know I’ll never have to dream again…”. The voluptuous voice of Connie Boswell, oozing sensuality, is fully at odds with the dullness of that act, sounding as a scornful comment on boring daily routines. On the other hand, we witness a disclosure of truth belonging to a male character yet delivered through a female voice, following a path rarely displayed in movies, where the verbal communication of private thoughts has traditionally been allied with femininity. By contrast, we have a man who wishes to express disarming honesty directly through song lyrics. In the following scene, Arthur persists in paraphrasing or quoting verses to express his thoughts. The character declares that there is nothing inside him, that he feels empty, echoing the famous Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You in which the singer describes a weary routine that fails to spark excitement or awaken his emotions. Interrogating his wife about the meaning of life, he anticipates that, for her, life is just a “bowl of dog biscuits”, an expression that rephrases Rudy Vallee’s famous Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries. Later, after a second attempt to persuade her to have sexual intercourse, he quotes the famous, daring Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It. Here, songs are paramount elements, at times belied, even discredited – dog biscuits substitute cherries –, more often, by him at least, fostered as a spiritual support. While Arthur’s wife does not seem to share, nor even understand, his fondness for music, representing an embryonic criticism against vapid products of a profit-driven popular culture incapable of interpreting ‘real-people’s problems’, Arthur is aware of the revolutionary creativity breaking out from songs. The stiff-necked seriousness of his too homely wife triggers off a rhetorical question in him, “Don’t you ever listen to the words in the songs?”. Similarly, if we wish to account for the pervasiveness of these radical pleasures, we must, indeed, keep on listening to “words in songs” and to their load of mercurial, disruptive spirit. 

Like many other, even more popular, songs used in the movie, I’ll Never Have to Dream Again is a perfect example of the rigid 32-bar AABA form that Tin Pan Alley publishers commonly exploited, betraying a cliché-ridden conventionality. Nonetheless, its use in this film is not so much a reminder of the cultural relevance or aesthetic complexity of popular products as a signal of their thematic and narrative efficacy: the song explains Arthur’s feelings in a way that no other cinematic device could. In a seminal essay, Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition, Rick Altman suggests the close relationship between songs and storytelling. ‘Classical’ scores are valuable supports to the fundamental aim the images convey: they emphasize emotions, alleviate visual ruptures, or offer counterpoint, and yet, lacking narrative and verbal content, are inevitably confined to the limits of a mute, abstract comment upon the images, to be heard in silent contemplation. Otherwise, the lyrics of a song reproduce the grip that a speech has on listeners, as a verbal communication interpreting the storyteller’s aim. A song can say, reveal, or express, functioning as a pep talk or confession, often thriving from the typical agility of the colloquial and concise American vernacular, with its simplified diction and short sentence construction. As the lip-synch of Pennies from Heaven shows, the escapism offered by popular products can be as significant and revealing as the deepest form of social criticism interested in discovering the “real world” beyond fanciful plots. Using the vocal tracks of popular songs, a character could speak what Altman defines as a “more sincere, personal and unguarded language, no longer watched over by the censorship of the conscious mind or of the social conventions”. 

At the first level, songs tell stories – mostly about love, unrequited or returned, broken or renewed, about pleas for forgiveness or acceptance of hidden desires – displaying an overwhelming frankness. In the already mentioned I Get a Kick Out of You, for instance, the loss of love becomes a metaphor for the dark kernel that the Great Depression represented to all, as in many romantic comedies and dramas of the decade, where a problematic relationship was a trope for economic stagnation and psychic depression. The energy expressed by Let’s Face the Music and Dance (Irving Berlin), Pick Yourself Up (Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields), They Can’t Take That Away from Me (George and Ira Gershwin) is different from the bitter-sweet, ironic hesitation and misunderstanding of A Fine Romance (Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields), Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off (George and Ira Gershwin), and I Won’t Dance (Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields). However, all are signs – albeit exquisite – of what was profoundly desired but hardly accomplished during those difficult days. Still, the semantic level is not the only level at which song lyrics operate. Sometimes a song is simply interested in showing a particular form of vitality or of brightness, often deprived of significance and expressing the singer’s liveliness, their eagerness to live. In no other composer is this liberatory force more consistent and concrete than in Cole Porter. It is sufficient to focus on the titles of his songs to get an idea of the daring themes he used to display: Anything Goes, Let’s Do It, You Do Something to Me. In Porter, we find both aspects. On the one hand, we trace the tradition of witticism that emerged in Franklin Pierce Adams’ column The Conning Tower – defined by Philip Furia as “the pinnacle of verbal wit” – or the sophisticated smarty verse full of casual remarks and vernacular idioms produced by the artists who used to lunch at the Algonquin Round Table between the 1920s and the 1930s. On the other hand, we also outline a desire to make the sound of vocal expressions appear more important than the significance of the words used. Consider, for instance, the onomatopoeic sounds of Night and Day and their ability to evoke an excruciating obsession – the “beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom” or the “drip, drip, drip of the raindrop” are compared to a voice within the singer that keeps on repeating “you, you, you”. Although extremely simple, the pronoun “you” evokes intrepid personal visions that unfold into a debonair, sanguine attitude toward life. The liberatory thrust is grounded in words but goes beyond their significance. Richard Dyer pointed out that words always “imply spatial positions – for I or you or she or he must be somewhere – as well as temporal ones”. Still, vocal tracks can reproduce rhythmic densities beyond space and time; they are comparable to phatic vocalizations, primarily bound to express a less functional statement. If it is true that a musical instrument can mimic the effects of a speech (a guitar can talk), it is also true that words can engage listeners in wide affective codes that depend on idiosyncratic vocal timbres. They range widely, from smooth and warm to husky and guttural, and they significantly affect the efficacy of a song.

Aural intimacy 

Many scholars pointed out the centrality of speech in 1930s America. A rediscovery of the value of hearing also accompanied this moment. Talkies, radio programs, and recordings all sought to emphasize vocal resonances, contributing to the creation of some sort of audiophiliac fetishism. If in the cinema the first source of pleasure was the fascination produced by a synchronous speech – not yet worn off in the 1930s –, in radio shows and recordings, the voice was totally detached from sight, producing a different stimulation. While the sight is fixed on a frontal view, absorbed into a perspective, the hearing seems freer, having to do more with a unified field of instant relationships among different points: sounds are all around us, we are wrapped in a sonorous womb, imbued in a soundscape. When deprived of the sight’s logical anchor, the voice, indeed, regains its mysterious, free nature. McLuhan thought that the ear was a hyper-aesthetic organ, standing in proximity to the physical sensitivity of the skin. Anaïs Nin’s The Winter of Artifice, written in 1939, described the potent relationship that develops between patient and analyst through the practice of listening to the other person’s voice, a relationship that in her case crossed the usual confines. As the writer stated, her psychoanalyst’s voice “rumbles over the surface of my skin, like another caress. I could stuff my ears and still it would find its way into my blood and make it rise”. In psychoanalysis, the interdiction against looking enables the listener to isolate the voice as a leading character in exercising its tactile and soothing power. 

This ability to touch remote chords would not have been easy to achieve or recognize without the advent of more sophisticated microphones that enabled a much finer level of involvement: “the microphone allowed us to hear people in ways that normally implied intimacy – the whisper, the caress, the murmur”. When bidirectional (ribbon) microphones replaced condenser microphones, voices began to sound lower and richer. It was not only a boost to the midrange but also a general enrichment of hearing experiences, something that deepened the realm of vocal sounds. Microphones allowed listeners to capture the subtleties of timbres and tones, pitches or inflections, as well as the voice’s organic qualities: “the liquidity of the saliva, the hissings and tiny shudders of the breath, the clicking of the tongue and teeth, and popping of the lips”. This new hearing experience mostly changed the sense of space: the voice seemed to be offered at our ear, whispered from very close proximity, producing an effect akin to what was described in Nin’s book. The effect was profoundly seductive, but its origin was neither human nor simply emotional: a technological distortion in the practice of singing very close to the microphones produced what became known as the ‘proximity effect’. In her study of crooning, Allison McCracken argues that this practice of singing closer to the mics “increased the bass and the vocal resonance of singers’ voices, giving them a warmer, fuller, more ‘close-up’ sound”, intensifying the already strong impression of vocal intimacy. To a certain extent, the microphones did for the ear what the close-up in movie theaters did for the eye, making us hear the nuances of vocal expression as if it were wrinkles, pores, eyelashes, or nostrils. 

During the late 1920s, crooners like Rudy Vallée and his less famous imitators were stigmatized because of their supposed effeminacy and described as immoral, immature, or untalented. Yet their success was enormous and continued for the following years, with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. The secret behind it was not only a modern and less stentorian singing style, but also the sensual, erotic reaction they produced within listeners. Growing feelings of personal attachment were openly shown in fans’ letters: “you sang Lovely Lady the other night, that is me, that is the way I feel”; “there is a haunting tenderness of touch in your voice”. This is what McCracken called a visceral intensity: “women wrote of the shivers they experienced listening to Vallée. A devoted deaf listener noted that she had a special radio made for her so she could literally feel the vibrations made by Vallée’s voice”. The emotional intensity was obviously conveyed through the lyrics, reproducing the Tin Pan Alley’s standard of romantic love or sexually provocative songs — emotions burned by the use of first and second person pronouns — and through the mic’s ability to pick up the smallest sigh more than the vigorous singing. Indeed, wannabe performers who did not have powerful chests or years of schooling at their back managed to hide the weakness in their voice behind passionate streams of vocalizations poured out into closely held microphones. According to McCraken, what was really unbearable to critics was not only the incapacity to reach higher notes, a flaw for which they were profoundly blamed, but also the apparent lack of emotional control. Fraught with yearning and despair, those songs suggested a rebuttal of the technical rules, which ended up in “sprawling laments deluging between the musical notes like tears”. The juvenile, feminine quality of early crooners was obviously emphasized through this bizarre array of vocalizations – “coos, stutters, scats, bird twitters, giggles, street slang, tremolo, trills, animal sounds, and even choked up tears” – for which they were profoundly denigrated. Still, the singer’s emotional sincerity and vulnerability remained one of the most immediate vehicles for modernization. 

Through a vicarious satisfaction of hidden emotional urges, the crooners promoted a less rigid stereotype of masculinity and modern ideas of human relationships, where the promise of romantic feelings and sexual needs could have been fulfilled.

Cowboy song, folk style, and the modernist aspiration 

The disruption of phrasing into a wordless vocalization was a peculiarity of soft, low crooning voices that often cracked on the verge of melodramatic tears. By contrast, others hollered airborne, in the effort to cover wider spaces, propelling their voices in what has been called a “non-verbal statement of youthful bravado, a catharsis, Whitman’s ‘barbaric yawp’”: they became known as singing cowboys. Like the crooner, always an object of devaluation because too immature or too commercial, the singing cowboy has often been the receiver of a similar disdain. Grown up in Poverty Row Studios such as Republic or Monogram and involved in carrying the genre’s tradition on during a period of neglect, the singing cowboy was the main reason for the success of these movies. Besides stunts, fistfights, and buffoonery, it was the personality of actors such as Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and Roy Rogers that was very appealing to farmworkers in rural areas. The films often moved from the Old West of the 19th century to a contemporary West for pragmatic and cost-saving reasons, but also to serve the cause of farmworkers, portraying their problems or interpreting their fears and threats. In films such as The Old Barn Dance (1938), Red River Valley (1936), Under Western Stars (1938), we see the same problems denounced: lack of irrigation systems; crooked loan companies; failures of the banks to guarantee protections; foreclosures of the land; mortgages; riots, strikes, and debts. In Autry’s biography, we read: “While my solutions were a little less complex than those offered by Roosevelt, and my methods a bit more direct, I played a kind of New Deal cowboy who never hesitated to tackle many of the same problems: the Dust Bowl, unemployment, or the harnessing of power. This may have contributed to my popularity with the 1930s audiences”. With this basis as a prime foundation, daring stunts, roping skills, gaudy costumes, and large smiles were added to repeat the patterns of dime novels and Wild West shows, largely palatable to working-class men and women.    

In a way, the cowboy songs stand in the immediate vicinity of the American folk songs. This subject was the kernel of 1930s culture, a decade of connection between vernacular and high art, where popular products welcomed also serious political commitment. The folk is a very slippery category, difficult to identify and distinguish because of its high degree of variation and its multilevel dimensions. The nature of a folk song is often deceitful or misleading. What seems authentic and orally passed-down through generations, lost in the mists of time, is arranged to sound like that by some professional musicians living a comfortable life in New York or working for a well-known publisher. The detection of the philological line of many songs might produce surprising results, as many scholars have recounted in their works. Due to a tolerance for both genuine and fabricated elements in folk expressions, cowboy songs have often been considered valuable for hunting expeditions, as illustrated by John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1905). With its roots in vernacular expressions and its strong references to the work and deeds of mounted cattle hands, even a cowboy song might sound like a pure exponent of what is folk music, primarily when it is performed with the only accompaniment of one or two instruments (generally fiddles, banjos, mandolins, or Appalachian dulcimers). A perfect illustration might be Dick Devall’s rendition of Tom Sherman’s Barroom (aka The Streets of Laredo or Cowboy’s Lament), in which is clearly detectable the ‘high, lonesome sound’ that in bluegrass or in folk music is associated with a striving effort to cover vast open lands or, changing direction, to reach the universe above. In that song, as Robert Cantwell writes, the voice “soars unbound in the polar regions” of the mind. Tom Sherman’s Barroom evokes a darker mood, reminiscent of the weird, mysterious tales of dying cowboys seeking compassion and a proper burial. These stories, often shared around a campfire, accompanied the ‘git along’ and resonated with the rhythm of a wrangler’s life. Just as these latter soothed the cattle with wordless vocalizations, they also sought to calm themselves, pressed to face the metaphysical dangers arising from a howling, thundering natural soundscape. Stanfield points out “Devall’s coarse and untutored vocal sound, as if his larynx was pickled in raw alcohol and tobacco juice”, which was very far from the genteel, refined, and sweeter sounds of Autry’s voice. The cowboy songs played in B-movies confidently declared that the supposed authenticity was, in fact, the result of communication codes and decisions made by the recording company and the film industry. In these films, Devall would have sounded quite bizarre and excessively creepy. 

As objects involved in cross-media promotions and massive marketing strategies, cowboy songs appeared similar to the popular standards of Tin Pan Alley and to crooning more than to raw folk music. They were recounting the same stories about love, romance, and friendship rather than allegories of a spiritual journey. A shallow image of the cowboy was manifested through them, as a useful paradigm or a stereotype, also in acoustic terms. We have cowboy songs reproducing cheerful animal sounds like coos, bird tweets, horse paces (the “clippety-clop”) or other sort of human signals such as cries and yells that were supposedly part of cowboys’ job on the trail, when they had to holler back herds from a stampede (“kia-yippie kie-yea” or “whoopee ti hi yo”). Everything seems transposed into an artificial, imaginative realm. Even the films centered their diegesis and musical routines on a plain faith in modernity, rather than on a description of some mystery hidden in the past. Consider, for example, Rovin’ Tumbleweeds (George Sherman 1939), where Gene Autry sings his hit-song Back in the Saddle Again in an editing sequence that shows all the gadgets of a radio station: mics, electric guitars, and ‘croonometers’ gauging the singer’s popularity among young girls. They are alternated with glimpses of a family gathered in front of a radio set. Of the work and deeds of cattlemen has remained only a trace in the costume. The absence of frames – Autry and Ritter were requested as ‘themselves’ more than for the roles they were playing – helped turn the musical routine into a perfect showcase of a hit-song that listeners could buy on records or hear on radio shows once they got out of the theaters. 

As it happened for crooning, the cowboy song became a successful vehicle for modernization. In Bing Crosby’s song I’m an Old Cowhand (from Norman Taurog’s Rhythm on the Range, 1936), for example, the set discloses a few details of the formulaic tradition of the 19th century minstrel shows while simultaneously updating them in a modern version. The routine gathers various personalities who were popular in the contemporary mediascape. We see Bing Crosby, The Sons of Pioneers, and a folk-singer and humorist, Bob Burns, all singing together with a potentially controversial figure in the rural audience’s eyes: the Italian-American trumpeter Louis Prima. With his dark complexion and short stature, Prima looked like an African American jazz player. He is thus an unconventional figure to those accustomed to listening to whitewashed versions of songs. To a certain extent, through this musical medley, an audience from slower rural areas started to be familiar with the syncopated rhythms of a jazz-inflected song, albeit mingled with a folksy style. This helped confirm Crosby as a figure in between. As Armstrong said, “his voice was like a gold being poured out of a cup,” but his sense of timing was in some way more black than white. 

There is no better moment in American history than the 1930s to value the concept of utopian thinking discussed by Dyer. Utopia has always been a political issue, a concept encompassing the false needs imposed by a capitalist society that produces illusions and leads people into oblivion to maintain its power. Still, we are persuaded that the utopian horizon, when subsumed into media products at the level of metafiction, can appear differently. The key, here, is not a cognitive recognition of a political discourse but a sensitive perception of a richer emotive life. Utopia is a frame to shape audience sensibility, a way to feel what is desirable without wasting time in gauging its unattainability; this is the core of what is fun: feeling more than measuring or judging. In Only Entertainment, Dyer expands the notion of mere entertainment by emphasizing the importance of affective codes such as “energy, abundance, intensity, transparency, community”. To a certain extent, these codes of human sensibility are at work in media products because of the society’s specific inadequacy in fulfilling them: we live in scarcity, exhausted by monotony and routine, manipulated by advertising and false beliefs, and isolated in our houses. Aspects such as energy, abundance, and intensity betray the deceitful nature of the dominant ideology of a society incapable of supplying what is needed and thus forced to provide it by proxy. Still, energy and intensity also reveal the profound nature of entertainment and its relationship with the audience. It might be debatable, but we generally expect movies and songs to be gratifying and heart-warming — at least, this is what people presumably wanted in the 1930s. We must recognize, in fact, that the confidence in the power of amusement as a catalyst for modernization was at its best exactly in that decade. Never again would entertaining products appear as they were at that moment, as propelling forces to catapult every soul into an upper atmosphere, above mundane concerns and sunken states of mind.

References

Altman, Rick, ‘Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition’, Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, edited by Pamela R. Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 19-30. 

Altman, Rick, ‘Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism’, Yale French Studies, 60 (1980), 67-80.

Cantwell, Robert, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 

Connor, Steven, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Dickstein, Morris, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009).

Dyer, Richard, In the Space of a Song: The Uses of song in Film (New York: Routledge, 2012).

———.  Only Entertainment (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Filene, Benjamin, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 

Furia, Philip, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Furia, Philip and Laurie Patterson, The Songs of Hollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 

Malone, C. Bill, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).

McCracken, Allison, Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

Minganti, Franco, ‘Paesaggi sonori & anafonie equine: l’immaginario sonico dell’espansione verso Ovest’, Topografia delle culture, edited by Roberto Vecchi and Rita Monticelli, (Bologna: Emil, 2011), 251-278.

Rath, Richard, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).   

Smith, Jacob, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

Stanfield, Peter, Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

White, John, Git Along Little Dogies: Songs and Songmakers of the American West (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975).