Wednesday, September 14, 2016




Whistle me up a melody, partner.


The theme songs from the early television cowboy shows captured me as a child, and have stayed with me for a lifetime. When Harry Warren and Harold Adamson wrote The Legend of Wyatt Earp they had no idea their words and the music would live in minds and media beyond black and white TV and far beyond their time.

Like Italian Gioachino Rossini could not have known that he would leap into the future in an odd manner with the last of 39 operas he had written. In 1829 he premiered his opera William Tell that contained a dazzling overture now associated with and famous as the theme for a television show - The Lone Ranger.

I never missed an episode when I was a kid. Years later in Los Angeles, I happened to work with a guy who lived next door to Clayton Moore, The Lone Ranger. My friend said Clayton used to go around outside his home in his Lone Ranger outfit, complete with mask, and continued to do so long after the television show had ended. You can draw your own conclusions. I think cowboys and cowboy music had affected him also.

You don't have to throw your rope out too far to lasso this one.
My mother told me, well she told a friend and I overheard, she was angry that my older brother had asked her if there were cowboys around when she was a child. What a silly thing to think. She was unaware that the sheriff of Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, passed away in Los Angeles in 1929 when she was a young woman of fourteen.

Reputed at one time to be the richest man in the world, American entrepreneur Howard Hughes hired a cowboy to move a large herd of horses from Oklahoma to northern Arizona, then got the cowboy and world champion rodeo rider a job riding horses in the movies. Soon Ben started stunt riding, doubling for actors like John Wayne and James Stewart and many others, known actors that could never be as skilled and daring or get a star on the sidewalk in Hollywood as a real cowboy, or be inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. The former rodeo star, rider turned actor, was Ben Johnson. He was a friend of mine and one of the nicest guys you'd ever know.

This morning I woke with the words and melody of that television show from so long ago: The Legend of Wyatt Earp. The words and melody circled my mind as I had my first cup of coffee and decided to write these notes. Coincidentally, my wife read in the news that today on the sixth of September, television actor Hugh O'Brian who played Wyatt Earp in the TV series died at age 91. Yet, the cowboy legends live on.

"And none can deny it
the legend of Wyatt
forever will live on the trail."



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