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Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy by Peter Stanfield (Paperback, 2002)

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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, and other singing cowboys were an audience largely ignored by mainstream Hollywood 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

Product Identifiers

Publisher
University of Illinois Press
ISBN-13
9780252070495
eBay Product ID (ePID)
96830085

Product Key Features

Book Title
Horse Opera: the Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy
Author
Peter Stanfield
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Publication Year
2002
Number of Pages
192 Pages

Dimensions

Item Height
229mm
Item Width
152mm

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Peter Stanfield
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy by Peter Stanfield (Paperback, 2002)

About this product

Product Information

Product Identifiers

Product Key Features

Dimensions

Additional Product Features

Best Selling in Books

The Concise 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene (Paperback, 2002)

Behind Dark Eyes: The True Story of Jon English by Jeff Apter (Paperback, 2021)

First Day by Andrew Daddo (Paperback, 2014)

Conversations with Phantoms: Exclusive Interviews About the 1978 TV Movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park by Ron Albanese (Paperback, 2020)

Save on Books

Frank Herbert'S Dune Saga 3-Book Boxed Set: Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of

A Gentleman in Moscow: The worldwide bestseller by Amor Towles (Paperback, 2017)

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