Gene Austin – The father of southern pop
From Hillbilly to Cowboy Crooning
He came by the music naturally enough. As he told noted writer and friend H. Allen Smith, Austin spent his early childhood near Gainesville, Texas, close to the Chisholm Trail, and could hear real cowboys singing high as they drove herds up through the Panhandle. Born Lem Eugene Lucas in 1900, he became Gene Austin after his mother’s divorce and remarriage to blacksmith Big Jim Austin, who moved the family to the swampy town of Yellow Pine, Louisiana, not far from Shreveport, when Gene was 7.
The musically inclined boy was soon paying a black girl his own age who played organ in church “two bits” to teach him the basics of piano. How “country” was this Austin family? Tommy Overstreet recalls that during Austin’s successful years, he sent his mother one of those new gas ranges to improve her life — and Gene found it on the front lawn upon his next visit home, because she just couldn’t get logs to catch fire in the thing at all.
That was not Gene’s destiny. Escaping from a home he found stifling, he hoboed through the south, then joined the circus as a calliope player, took a tramp steamer to Shanghai, joined the army to fight in the expedition in Mexico against Pancho Villa (only to be “outed” as underage by future cowboy movie star Tom Mix of the same unit), played piano along with the keyboard “professors” in New Orleans whorehouses, and went off to World War I in France — all by the age of 18.
By 1924 he was in New York’s Tin Pan Alley working as a song plugger when he was approached by Vocalion records about helping out with a little problem. A blind Tennessee mountain singer and guitarist, George Reneau, was in the city to record sides for the nascent hillbilly market sparked by instrumental successes from Fiddlin’ John Carson and vocals such as Vernon Dalhart’s “Prisoner’s Song” (“If I had the wings of an angel”).
Reneau’s vocals were too rough for their needs — on the muddy, deep side for acoustic mikes that captured high singing better — and the guitar ace was disconcerted by the equipment in the room. Austin was hired to ghost the vocals for several dozen Reneau records of 1924-25 — such country classics (some covers, some new to recording) as “Wreck Of The Southern 97”, “Little Rosewood Casket” and “Little Brown Jug”, all in a voice adopted for the occasion that was distinctly southern. Austin sounded more twangy, in fact, than others of the moment, and sang with a clarity and jaunty rhythm that approached swinging beyond that of nearly all old-timey recordings.
The details of these sessions remained mysterious until, in 1939, Austin outlined them for Jim Walsh, a reporter for the Johnson City Press and a groundbreaking record collector in Reneau’s northeast Tennessee area. How anybody imagined Reneau was doing the singing while playing harmonica is anyone’s guess, but the secret was maintained, even when Edison Records recorded new, longer versions of the same numbers clearly labeled “The Blue Ridge Duo — George Reneau and Gene Austin.”
These often fetching 78s are long out of print, and some reissue house would be wise to get them out on disc. Only old-timey specialists know them at all today, even if June Carter was still doing a version of the Austin/Reneau side “Bald-Headed End Of The Broom” in the 1950s.
Some of those 78s did pretty well, and Austin clearly enjoyed the experience. While avoiding identification with hillbilly music, he went on recording country sides for several years, quietly, even as he hit it big as a pop star. He made lean, catchy versions of “Old Liza Jane” and “Sally Gooden” with fiddler Uncle Am Stuart; a fascinating urban-meets-country hybrid called “Way Down Home” sung with Carson Robison; and two sides, including a breezy early version of the folk favorite “Get Along Cindy”, under the pseudonym Bill Collins.
When The Gene Austin Story was dramatized on network TV in 1957, the blind hillbilly street singer (Reneau) transmogrified into a blind delta blues singer. Overstreet, who was on the set, says the producers had decided it was “cooler” for Gene to have begun with blues than country. “And don’t they always,” he laughed.
Austin’s early old-timey sides show how thin the line between “hillbilly” singing and pop could be, and predict future country vocal directions. But they had little impact on country music. Yet Austin’s pop crooning hits — free of accent, twanging strings and railroad wrecks — would.
By the early ’30s, Austin’s five-year run of massive pop hitmaking was about over. His carousing started to get in the way, there was a divorce, the Depression had nearly killed the whole record business — and baritone Bing Crosby, who incorporated more jazz-like playfulness and was more of a leading man for the movies, dominated the remaining market. (One of Crosby’s earliest hits was the Austin-penned “Ridin’ Around In The Rain”.)
Austin’s simple songs of the good-time present didn’t quite fit on 1930s pop charts, which tended toward either the sadder (“Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?”), or the blatantly manic (“We’re In The Money!”). But the wistful southern pop singing style he’d created and the sentiments he’d expressed nevertheless found a growing home. They were applied to the simple life of an imaginary and musical Hollywood “west,” where cowboy radio crooners ran around on horses chasing bandits with fast cars and modern conveniences. The key star who rode that horse, was, of course, Gene Autry, the main challenger to Crosby for record sales in these years.
Autry rarely discussed his musical influences, but he’s on record as having first met and worked with Gene Austin in New York, just as he switched from being one more Jimmie Rodgers hillbilly blues imitator to what he became — a clean, clear, often wistful pop delineator of songs such as “Blueberry Hill” and the very Austin-sounding “Mexicali Rose”. No predecessors for this sound are spotted even in an authoritative volume such as Doug Green’s Singing In The Saddle, perhaps because only country music and earlier cowboy movie singers get considered as the source.
In the ’30s, Eddy Arnold was a Tennessee farm kid, a teen “ploughboy,” as they’d call him later on, who ordered Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Austin records “right out of the Sears Roebuck catalogue,” as he recalled in a recent interview at his office near Nashville. (It would be nice to think that one of the Austin 78s he ordered was the one that went, “Dream on, little ploughboy; make believe you’re a cowboy…”)
Arnold, who recorded “Lonesome Road” decades ago (among many country-meets-pop records that would sell in Austin-like millions), played a tape of a mellow, simple, soulful version of “My Blue Heaven” that he recorded just a few years ago (and is thus far unreleased). A friend of both Genes, he related this unrecorded bit of Austin-Autry connection:
“Gene Autry was a friend of Gene Austin’s, too. He told me of how he was foolin’ round in New York in the late ’20s; he hadn’t happened yet, and was trying to get a record deal, but he already knew Gene Austin. He got a call from Austin saying he wanted him to come to his office. So he went — and when he arrived he found Jimmie Rodgers sitting there. That’s how Gene Autry met Jimmie, because of Gene Austin — which he said was the biggest thrill in his life.”