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HAT is this illusion behind the plaintive melodies of the great southwestern plains? Who are the owners of those sad, sweet voices which are wafted nightly on a calm ether to instill happiness in the ears of a thousand listeners5 What, and why, are the cowboy crooners?
And to whom do the songs of the plains appeal?
Why, to everybody. If there is a person who can resist the harmonic transition of the old songs, he or she has yet to be discovered. If there is anyone who is able to twirl the dial beyond the station broadcasting those tunes of an earlier generation, where is that person?
And all of this brings up the question of why these western songs and melodies have gained such widespread popularity. The pertinent question of whether it is the very romance of the melodies themselves, the charm of the songs, as it were — or the personalities
of the singers which put them across.
Let us take one representative group. The KTM Ranch Boys. Those apparently gay, careless cowpunchers from the great broad plains of the southwest who warble so charmingly. Is there romance there; is there really a background of rough riding, hard drinking, dangerous living men who back up their songs with careless, dramatic lives of actuality? Or are we merely listening to a bunch of vaudeville and ham actors temporarily out of jobs? It's a nice question.
There are almost a dozen of those Ranch Boys. They look, from a casual glance at their pictures, as though they were the real, dyed-in-the-wool goods. They look tough and hardened to the range. They look as though they could throw a rope or throw the bull. Let us go behind the photographer's mask.
There's Jack Ross, whose deep, sad voice and twanging guitar have
reached the hearts of a thousand lonely maidens in a thousand lonely homes. Jack is twenty-seven years old. No one can deny that Jack looks the part. His high cheek bones, his lean, slightly tanned face and his whipcord body indicate a hard rider of the range.
Now Jack's been one of the Ranch Boys for two years. An old hand at the game. He doesn't give that native blush when he faces a mike. He doesn't seem at all perturbed when he walks into an editor's office and blandly asks for a shot of publicity. He has a faint trace of a Southern accent. Sometimes, in fact, when he tells you tall tales of a hundred thousand acre ranch in Arizona, he leans over a little to get the soft Southern drawl in his voice.
Jack was born in Arizona. He is unmarried and has done a number of things. There was a six-year stretch when he did stunt work in pictures. So at least he knows how
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