Music in the Western

Notes From the Frontier

Kathryn Kalinak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136620560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier presents essays from both film studies scholars and musicologists on core issues in western film scores: their history, their generic conventions, their operation as part of a narrative system, their functioning within individual filmic texts and their ideological import, especially in terms of the western's construction of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. The Hollywood western is marked as uniquely American by its geographic setting, prototypical male protagonist and core American values. Music in the Western examines these conventions and the scores that have shaped them. But the western also had a resounding international impact, from Europe to Asia, and this volume distinguishes itself by its careful consideration of music in non-Hollywood westerns, such as Ravenous and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and in the "easterns" which influenced them, such as Yojimbo. Other films discussed include Wagon Master, High Noon, Calamity Jane, The Big Country, The Unforgiven, Dead Man, Wild Bill, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.

Contributors

Ross Care
Corey K. Creekmur
Yuna de Lannoy
K. J. Donnelly
Caryl Flinn
Claudia Gorbman
Kathryn Kalinak
Charles Leinberger
Matthew McDonald
Peter Stanfield
Mariana Whitmer
Ben Winters

The Routledge Music and Screen Media Series offers edited collections of original essays on music in particular genres of cinema, television, video games and new media. These edited essay collections are written for an interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars of music and film and media studies.

Part I

Music in the Classical Hollywood Studio Film

Chapter 1

The Cowboy Chorus

Narrative and Cultural Functions of the Western Title Song

Corey K. Creekmur

Major Hollywood genres can be appreciated through concepts that also apply to works of music. Westerns, for instance, may be enjoyed as variations on a theme, with fans welcoming the pleasurable recurrence of familiar motifs in ways similar to the enjoyment of many repetitive musical patterns and forms.¹ Furthermore, the basic components of the western, like fundamental musical elements, can seem comfortably stable, even as the demands of sheer novelty and aesthetic innovation encourage stylistic changes in response to shifting social contexts and cultural tastes. Thus, critics of the film western simultaneously emphasize its continuity as a narrative or mythic form repeating familiar elements while tracing the genre’s historical development from classic examples towards self-critical revision. Aficionados of popular musical forms such as the blues or jazz engage in similar forms of subtle negotiation, taking pleasure in reassuring continuity and tradition while excited by challenging alteration and experimentation. In addition to the larger analogy of genres to musical forms, the role of music itself within the western can concretely demonstrate the regular, creative tension between stability and change characterizing the genre overall. While links might be drawn between the musical scores composed for westerns across the genre’s entire history, at a moment in the 1950s—a decade considered one of the genre’s artistic and cultural high points—the otherwise stable soundtracks of westerns suddenly allowed for a significant variation. This chapter focuses on that prominent but neglected period in the musical history of the western, when sung title songs became a prominent feature of the genre. While the western had previously and typically employed instrumental theme songs, the new practice of including title songs with evocative lyrics immediately established itself as a common element of the genre, functioning in effect as an invented tradition without obvious precedent.²

Before focusing exclusively on the western title song, however, it should be emphasized that this variation within the genre took place within a larger but rarely considered shift in the overall construction of Hollywood soundtracks and credit sequences. Among other changes, credit sequences became more detailed, and more unique in their design, abandoning the standard house styles associated with particular studios rather than film genres in previous decades. Most significantly, previously brief credit sequences were extended, so that they could now accommodate the typical two to three minute duration of popular songs. The critical neglect of credit sequences featuring title songs is especially curious since such songs, especially when employing attention-grabbing vocals and meaningful lyrics, often present themselves as a prominent, even obtrusive element in the experience of a film, in marked contrast to the commonly noted goal of the unobtrusive, “inaudible” Hollywood film score to ease a spectator into the emotional mood of a film. Rather, when considered at all, the vocalized title song is often summarily dismissed; for instance, Mervyn Cooke declares “The least creative application of popular music common in 1960s soundtracks was the showcasing of main-title songs and interpolated songs performed by commercially viable artists.”³ Notably, the moment most often identified with initiating this ongoing lack of creativity, establishing the persistent reign of the semi-autonomous title song in Hollywood cinema, involves the success of a cowboy song in a western, although the subsequent practice has relied most often upon the rise of rock and roll as the dominant form of American popular music. Echoing other historians of film music, Russell Lack cites Elmer Bernstein’s damning claim that “the death of the classical film-music score began in 1952 with an innocuous pop song that was used in the title sequence of the classic Gary Cooper Western High Noon.”⁴

Moreover, the practice unleashed by High Noon has typically been viewed as a blatantly commercial effect, affirming the increased interdependence of the film and music industries as corporate partners but not necessarily as artistic collaborators. Jeff Smith thus emphasizes that “as important as High Noon was for the techniques of film scoring, it was perhaps more important to the business of film music marketing.”⁵ Smith notes that the song, by composer Dimitri Tiomkin and lyricist Ned Washington, was aggressively marketed through the common practice of releasing multiple versions (in this case six) of the same song. (While Neil Lerner also recognizes that the song “played no small part in transforming how the industry planned, produced, and marketed their soundtracks,” he also argues that High Noon’s “film score meaningfully subverts a number of the established Hollywood conventions for musical accompaniment.”⁶) Performed in the film by the unseen veteran singing cowboy star Tex Ritter, the title song to High Noon—most often identified by its first line as “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” but simply named “High Noon” in the film’s credits—became even more popular in a version recorded by Italian American singer Frankie Laine (born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio), whose subsequent career would be dominated by his title songs for film and television westerns. Cooke, also citing the “aggressive pre-release exposure of the High Noon song by United Artists, who intended it to be a popular hit from the outset,” summarizes the industrial impact of the new strategy:

Songs carrying titles identical to those of the films to which they were attached were at the same time beginning to exploit the attractive proposition that the films would inevitably be mentioned every time the songs were broadcast; not surprisingly, producers were quick to seize on a phenomenon that neatly combined the generation of additional royalties with free airtime advertising.⁷

Although the film and popular music industries had already been intertwined for decades, historians imply that the success of High Noon and especially of its title song fully established a new model and level of cross-media promotion and revenue.

There is certainly evidence to support such claims. Advertising for major westerns began to regularly promote their title songs as a major attraction. Posters for Wichita (1955), seeking to mine the renewed popularity of High Noon’s original vocalist, induced audiences to “Hear TEX RITTER sing the title song,” while posters for The Maverick Queen (1956) promised “Joni James sings ‘The Maverick Queen’ by Ned Washington and Victor Young,” drawing upon Washington’s new status as Hollywood’s top western song lyricist. Increasingly informative credit sequences also prominently identified title songs and singers in addition to composers, and advertised for recording companies: in typical fashion, a title card for 3:10 to Yuma (1957) credits the composer, George Duning, and conductor, Morris Stoloff, of the film’s score while also identifying the title song that audiences were currently listening to as written by, once again, Ned Washington and George Duning, and sung by Frankie Laine, “a Columbia Recording Artist.”

In some cases, western title songs allowed the film’s stars an additional outlet for their talents: acting singer Dean Martin provided the title song for Five Card Stud (1968), as did singing actor Robert Mitchum for Young Billy Young (1969); late entries in the cycle. Earlier, the casting of Elvis Presley in his first film motivated the addition of four songs and a title change from The Reno Brothers to Love Me Tender (1956), already the title of Presley’s million-selling single, based on the Civil War ballad “Aura Lee,” released two months earlier. Even Presley’s later desire to play his only non-singing role in the western Charro! (1969) seemed to require at least a western-style title song, by Billy Strange and Mac Davis, from the singer.

If the cross-promotional function of title songs to drive the sales of film soundtrack albums is undeniable, blatant commercialism alone might not fully explain the other purposes such songs can play in westerns, or entirely account for their arrival at a historical moment. In one of the few critical considerations of the function of title songs and credit sequences in Hollywood cinema, Will Straw acknowledges the commercial drive behind the practice of using pop songs to start a film, but also considers how “self-contained theme songs” as well as the design elements of credit sequences participate in an overlooked “history of filmic ornamentation.”⁸ Straw thus encourages an investigation of the western title song that might consider its formal or cultural functions in addition to more obvious commercial aims, as I hope my consideration of one of the genre’s most celebrated examples will soon illustrate. Given its pervasive impact, it might simply be pedantic to point out that High Noon is often wrongly identified as the first western and even the first Hollywood movie to employ a sung title song: at least one western precedent can be found in Man in the Saddle (1951), which includes a title song—touted as one of the film’s attractions in its trailer—performed by rising country music star Tennessee Ernie (who soon added Ford to his name).⁹ But High Noon’s popularity and influence, reinforced by Oscars for a rarely celebrated genre, rather than its primacy, fully justifies its identification as a watershed in the history of western film soundtracks. Phillip Drummond effectively summarizes the innovation of the film’s song and score:

High Noon’s musical originality lies . . . in its overall departure from Hollywood conventions in three main ways. First, the film does not commence and conclude on a full-orchestral fortissimo, but pianissimo, with a ballad-singer accompanied only by guitar, accordion and drums. Second, the single theme-tune becomes part of the dramatic underscore, anticipating Tiomkin’s Greek chorus-like ballad for Sturges’ Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). The score is virtually monothematic, the tune acting as the source of virtually every bar of the orchestral incidental music. Third, the role of the symphony orchestra changes, with the burden of expression being taken away from the strings. The violins are dispensed with altogether, and the lower strings which remain (violas, celli and double basses) are totally subordinate to a wind, brass, and piano-dominated sonority. The result is a darker, starker, de-glamourized quality of tone-colour, one that accords perfectly with the nature of the scenario.¹⁰

While High Noon’s success probably motivated the use of title songs in a wide range of films, it immediately altered the construction and marketing of westerns, whether low-budget independent films or the prominent studio productions by the genre’s most celebrated directors.

For instance, early in his illuminating book on John Ford’s masterpiece, now celebrated as perhaps the greatest Hollywood western, Edward Buscombe directs our attention to “the first word of The Searchers. It’s a question. ‘Ethan?’”¹¹ But Buscombe soon recalls that, “Strictly speaking, ‘Ethan?’ is not the first word uttered in The Searchers, nor the first question. Over the credits we hear the opening stanza and chorus of a song written by Stan Jones and sung by Sons of the Pioneers, a singing group Ford had earlier used on screen in Rio Grande.”¹² Buscombe’s strict correction not only retrieves the film’s suggestive title song for any analysis of the film, but his seemingly casual identification of two “first” words “in The Searchers” suggests the curious way in which a title song may function, not only in this classic western but also in other examples of the genre and perhaps in other types of films.¹³

Strictly speaking, the title song is heard in the film, but does not take place in the story, or diegesis, that contains other performed songs. Like the more typical non-diegetic score, the title song is neither produced nor heard by any of the narrative’s characters, and so is only performed for us, the viewing and listening audience, even though, in the manner of classical Hollywood cinema, we are not otherwise explicitly acknowledged or directly addressed by the film. As Will Straw perceptively notes, credit sequences as a whole, including music, “presuppose a direct, pragmatic communication with the audience frequently at odds with notions of the self-contained diegetic fiction.”¹⁴ Although the title song in The Searchers is presumably linked to the story (it first asks the questions the narrative will continue to pose), its formal function is to precede or even exceed the story that unfolds within the film, clearly marked at its outer edges by on-screen credits as well as the off-screen song: we know the story is beginning when the song fades away a few minutes after the film has begun, and we know that the story is ending when the song rises again on the soundtrack to anti...