Roy Rogers (Marty Rogers, Snuff Garrett) interviewed by Larry Hopper

1980

These excerpts are from the radio interview of Marty Robbins, Roy Rogers and Tommy "Snuff" Garrett by Larry Hopper, first aired on Station WFDU-FM in Teaneck, NJ on July 6, 1980, six weeks after Bob Nolan's death.

Larry is a respected music historian and writer who, at the time of this broadcast, had his own live radio program called, "Down Home Frolic" where he played and discussed vintage music.

THEY SING OF THE WEST: Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers

Most of us can remember sitting in a darkened theater watching those great B Westerns of the 30s and 40s, enjoying vicariously the thrills of the chase, the gunfights and those rotten ‘bad guys.’ But when the fighting stopped and the action slowed, many of us remembered the cowpokes who always seemed to have a guitar and a fiddle and a ready arrangement to sing for us. In many of those westerns that group of singing cowboys was the Sons of the Pioneers.

Country singer Marty Robbins remembers, “The Sons of the Pioneers originally started ‘way back in the 30s, the early 30s, and I think that Roy Rogers is the only one that is left. But them and Gene Autry really had an influence on my life because I would see their movies and want to be one of them, or somebody like them.”

Roy Rogers is the one person who was a part of those early days and helped found the Sons of the Pioneers. He’ll tell you the story in a moment but first we must realize that time has passed and though we remember names, and scenes, and glorious action on the screen, things have changed and that change is reflected in a song Roy recorded a few years ago, Hoppy, Gene and Me. To get the story of the Sons of the Pioneers, I called Roy at his museum in Apple Valley, California. This is the story he told.

ROY: Well, I came to California in the early 30s and there was a little radio station in Inglewood, California, which was just a few miles up the road from where we lived. They had a program every Saturday night called The Midnight Frolic and it was an amateur show and anybody could get on it. So my sister practically drug me up to that radio station ‘cause I was scared to death and when they announced my name why she practically pushed me out onto the stage and I got out and I sang and yodeled and played mandolin and guitar.

They took my name and address when I finished and about two or three days later a fellow called me from a group called The Rocky Mountaineers and I joined the group - but I was the only singer in the group. They were all musicians. So I talked them into running an ad in the paper and see if we couldn’t find a fellow that could sing tenor or harmony and stuff like that. Bob Nolan answered the ad.

I never will forget the day that he answered it. He was a lifeguard at the Santa Monica beach, down at the ocean, and those days we had the Red Cars (like the streetcars we had in the earlier days?) and he rode the old Red Car as far as the end of the line, as far as he could go, and then he had to walk I don’t know how far. But I guess he figured he was gonna impress us so he had to get a new pair of shoes. When he arrived, he knocked on the door and we were all there waiting. He had a pair of shoes in his hands and a blister about the size of a dime on each heel! Of course, we got a kick out of that and Bob came in and we sang some songs.

And so he joined us and we worked as the Rocky Mountaineers and we needed a third one in the group for singing. He said he had a friend down at the beach and maybe we could get together and make a trio. So he brought a fellow by the name of Bill Nichols up with him. About 5 or 6 months of that Bob quit and went to Bel Air Country Club caddying because we weren’t even making enough money to live on.

So we ran another ad in the paper and Tim Spencer answered the ad. And so Tim and Slumber (Bill Nicholls) and I—we nicknamed him “Slumber”—we worked together for quite awhile and finally The Rocky Mountaineers broke up and we joined another group called The International Cowboys. A fellow named Benny Nawahi had a group and he had some Mexican boys in it and cowboys from Texas.

We had an invitation to go on the road and kinda on a barnstorming trip in 1933 and one of the fellows on the radio station there sold us on the idea. He was selling time on the radio station and he said he thought he could make us some money if we went on the road and played some of these little theaters down through New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. So, Tim and Slumber and I, we got two other guys by the name of Cyclone (our fiddle player) and Cactus Mac, the most well-known at that time. We went on the road as Cactus Mac and His O-Bar-O Cowboys and for about three months we ate all the jack rabbits between Arizona and New Mexico and down into Texas. Finally raked up enough money to get back home and then we broke up.

Tim Spencer, he went back to work for the Safeway grocery company and I went to work on a group called Jack and His Texas Outlaws. See, I was just on this group with another group of singers that didn’t have the blend that our original trio had so I went back to Tim Spencer at the Safeway store and I told him, I said, “Why don’t we go out and see if we can get Bob Nolan to join us and get a trio back together.”

We drove out to the country club and told Bob Nolan what we had in mind and he said well, it sounded pretty encouraging because we’re all on a good station at the time. (A Warner Brother’s station, KFWB) They had several live shows on that station. So we got into a boarding house that cost us nine dollars a week, room and board, so the three of us holed up there and learned about three or four hundred songs which later came out on the Standard Radio Corporation Transcriptions (that’s the big transcriptions in the early thirties and forties) and that’s how we became popular as the Sons of the Pioneers."

LARRY: Roy, I have a recording. Two recordings, actually. One is Kilocycle Stomp and the other is Cajun Stomp that were done in 1935 with the Farr Brothers and Len Slye, yourself.

ROY: Yes. Did you take that from the old transcriptions?

LARRY: No. I’ve got it on an album called Western Swing. I think somebody came up with the old 78 and transferred it.

ROY: Well, the way they’ve rustled the songs the last few years on cassettes, and everything else.... I don’t know where you got it, but when we recorded that Cajun Stomp that was originally recorded on those transcriptions.

LARRY: That was for the radio services you mentioned earlier?

ROY: Yeah. We were on that station and the manager of that station got us to record all of those songs and we ended not getting anything out of them, too. But Hugh and Karl Farr…Cajun Stomp…that was an arrangement that Hugh made with his fiddle and Karl with his guitar. Karl played the lead guitar and I played rhythm and Bob Nolan played bass.

LARRY: Hugh Farr on fiddle and brother, Karl, on guitar. And a head arrangement called Cajun Stomp. Hugh and Karl have been referred to as the Joe Venutti and Eddie Lang of Western Music. Roy, beside your radio work on the Sons of the Pioneers, you also made a few movies like Rhythm of the Range.

ROY: Oh, we did Rhythm of the Range with Bing Crosby as a group and we did a comedy with Joan Davis and El Brendel and we worked in a couple of Dick Foran’s westerns and a couple of Gene Autry’s westerns—as a group, you know.

LARRY: You didn’t remain long with the Sons of the Pioneers but went off to make your own movies. How did that happen?

ROY: When we came back from the Texas Centennial, I heard that Republic Studios were looking for a new singing cowboy. So I went out there and, over a period of a couple of months, I was signed up there. I started October 13, 1937 and I made my first picture in January, 1938. I was in pictures from then on.

LARRY: With your departure, that left a hole in the group.

ROY: When I went out there, I had to make arrangements to get released from Columbia and that’s when Pat Brady took my place with the Sons of the Pioneers, singing in my place.

LARRY: So, though you left the group to pursue your acting career, the Sons of the Pioneers still appeared with you in many of your pictures.

ROY: Later on, after the contract was up, why, we got them out of Columbia Studios and they worked on my pictures for a long time and still, when I go on the road, I still take the Sons of the Pioneers with me. They’re a wonderful group. Down through the years there’ve been a lot of guys come and gone and some of ‘em have passed away and some of ‘em retired. But I guess I’m the only one left, now, of the original Sons of the Pioneers.

LARRY: Roy didn’t completely break with the Sons, as far as recording with them. From time to time he has made records with them and in December, 1947, they recorded a song together for a Walt Disney animated short called Melody Time—Blue Shadows on the Trail by Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers. The Sons of the Pioneers made many pictures without Roy as Marty Robbins remembers.

MARTY: I saw most of them with Roy Rogers. I saw quite a few of them with Roy Rogers and I saw one, one time, John Wayne and the Sons of the Pioneers with Ken Curtis, I think, did a song in it—I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.

LARRY: The Sons also worked on John Ford’s Wagonmaster. Ken Curtis, whom Marty referred to, is well known for his characterization of Festus on TV’s Gunsmoke. Before Gunsmoke, he put in quite a bit of time with the Sons and can be heard soloing on Wedding Dolls. Although the Sons of the Pioneers did many songs by other writers, and traditional songs whose origins are clouded in time, they often performed songs by their own resident writers, Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer. Between the both of them, they wrote hundreds of songs, Bob Nolan’s two most famous being Cool Water and Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Tim wrote Everlasting Hills of Oklahoma, Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild Women and A Room Full of Roses. When Tim Spencer retired from the Pioneers, he ran his own music business and continued to write. He was equally adept at turning out a cowboy spiritual or a serious hymn. One of the aspects of the Sons of the Pioneers that made them stand out was their unique sound, or blend, as Roy pointed out earlier. I asked Marty Robbins what he liked about the Sons of the Pioneers.

MARTY: I have about twelve and a half hours of the Sons of the Pioneers on tape. I have some of their early radio shows, even. Naturally, I like that kind of music. I liked their harmony because they had a real manly sound. It wasn’t the smooth singing that other groups had, it was that out-on-the-range sound the Sons of the Pioneers had. I especially liked the songs, but I especially liked Bob Nolan’s singing. He sang like he could whip a bear. No one has ever sounded like Bob Nolan.

LARRY: And Bob Nolan’s unique voice was especially well showcased in songs of his own composition. Bob wrote about Nature, Man and strong personal emotions. Bob Nolan was a man who came down from Canada and fell in love with the West. It was an inspiration for the songs he wrote, whether they took time developing or they were written overnight to be sung in the next day’s filming. The production of B Westerns was a frenetic by-the-numbers organization. Films were sold for distribution in groups of, say, five Gene Autrys, four Dick Forans, six Roy Rogers. And they were made so fast they never had titles until they were completed. Bob worked in this crazy business and he was also doing the one-nighters, the recording sessions and the radio programs for about thirteen years before he retired. What kind of man was Bob? Roy and record producer Snuff Garrett share their views.

ROY: I just don’t think he liked show business to start with. He was just that type of guy. He was his own man and he didn’t particularly enjoy it like the rest of us did. Bob was kind of a private man. I’ve known him since 1932 and he was a very quiet man. He didn’t like groups, crowds, or anything. I’ve seen him sit out and gaze off into the sunset and he was writing a song all the time but you didn’t know it. When you go over some of the lyrics he that wrote, he really did a lot of deep thinking about it.

SNUFF: Bob was a reclusive sort of man and so he decided he’d spend the rest of his life just kinda doing what he wanted to do. The things that he’d done for years, traveling on the road and dates and so forth, all over the world, he just didn’t want any more. So, for all intents and purposes, he retired in 1948.

LARRY: Bob didn’t stay retired because I have here an album, The Sound of a Pioneer, which was released recently that featured new recordings of Bob. How did that come about, Snuff?

LARRY: I wanted to record Bob Nolan one last time, which, unfortunately, that’s how it turned out to be. He was still in fine voice and singing great and I think he was 71 years old.

MARTY: He could sing, could still sing the same notes he sang in 1930. He could sing the bass or he could sing the high tenor notes, it didn’t make much difference. He had such range in his voice and could control it just as well six weeks ago as he could thirty years ago.

LARRY: Well, Snuff, how did you get him to do the recording?

SNUFF: It took me over three years to talk him into recording. And I’m terribly persistent when I want to be. In fact, one time I was having a party at my home and, I’d been over at Bob’s for the afternoon, and I said, “We’re gonna have a party Friday night and there’s gonna be quite a few people there and stuff and we’d like for you to come.

And he said, “All right. I’d like to come,” he said, “But I don’t have a way. My wife’s out of town.” So I said, “Well, I’ll come over and pick you up.”

So a couple of days later, Nudie the Western Tailor, who’s been around for years and knows a lot of the guys and I’m good friends with, I said, “Nudie,” I said, “Bob’s coming to the party Friday night,” and he said, “Who told you?” and I said, “Bob told me,” and he said, “No, he’s not. I went to the last party Bob went to about seventeen or eighteen years ago. He said he’d never go to another party and that’s that.”

So, anyway, Nudie and I ended up making a hundred dollar bet whether he would or not. I went over there Friday night and he was sitting on the curb with his own bottle of wine, waiting on me. We got in the car and I said, “How y’doing, Mr. Nolan?” and he said, “Fine, Snuff, fine,” and he said, “Snuff, I have to be home at eight thirty. I feed my bird at eight thirty. He really gets upset if I don’t feed him and cover him up and everything,” and I said, “Fine.”

So we got to the party over there and he’d been so emphatic about being home at eight thirty that I… so I couldn’t have any fun. About eight o-five I went over to Bob and I said, “Mr. Nolan,” I said, “The car’s ready to take you home.” He said, “I don’t want to go home.” And I said, “Well, you said you had to get home to feed the bird.” He said, “Aw, to heck with the bird,” he said, “I feed him every night,” he said, “I’m having too much fun.”

LARRY: So it was just a matter of getting him out and then he enjoyed himself. It was the same way when Snuff finally got him to record. Of the eleven songs of the album five were written by Bob. Among the six written by other writers was Man Walks Among Us by Marty Robbins.

SNUFF: Man Walks Among Us is a beautiful song so I told Bob I’d like to record it. So Bob told me, he said, “Snuff, do you think Marty would mind…I’d like to change a couple of the words in there.” So when Marty got there I said, “Marty, Bob wanted to change this and …” He said, “Oh, God, that’s exciting enough, that he would even take the time to want to change anything.” You know. Then I asked Marty to sing harmony with him on the bridge and he came in…and that was another highlight. We had a good time recording.

LARRY: It wasn’t the first time that Bob and Marty had met. When did that happen, Marty?

MARTY: I met Bob Nolan the first time, I guess around 1971. He liked my singing and he liked my writing and there was a kind of mutual feeling there, you know. He liked the gunfighter things that I wrote and I liked the songs about nature that he wrote. He loved the wide-open spaces, he loved the flowers, he loved the animals, he was just a real kind man—a wonderful person to know.

LARRY: Snuff said that before Bob recorded Man Walks Among Us he wanted to change a few words.

Marty: Yeah. He asked me about it and I know how Bob felt so it was all right with me.

LARRY: What was the change made?

MARTY: I think “I see the eyes of a small cottontail, looking right back at me” I think is what I had.

LARRY: Bob changed that to “I could see God looking at me with the eyes of a young cottontail.” Were there any problems when you harmonized with Bob on the song?

MARTY: If he could have done it a key or two lower I would have liked it better, but that was the key that Bob was singing it in so I did the best I could to sing a little higher than I would usually sing.

LARRY: That recording session was back in 1978. Snuff, was there anything unusual that occurred during this session?

SNUFF: I’ll tell you one thing that happened at the session that was kind of funny. It was our second day in and we had done the tracks for a couple of days, the music tracks. Then we were putting Bob’s voice on before we got the chorus together and the backup singers. So Bob went out in the studio and lay down. I was standing in the studio with the engineer and Bob was out in the actual studio. I was in the control room and the speakers were open and I heard this noise. I said, “One of those speakers is really going out, cracking up.” And the engineer turned around and he said, “Yeah, what is that?” and he messed with the dials and so forth and then I looked through the glass and it was Bob.

Bob’s laying on one of the risers out there, just relaxing for a couple of minutes as he told me he was gonna do. And then I realized he had a cassette player next to him and he’d recorded the sound of a running stream up by his place up in the mountains, and he was laying there listening to that running stream to relax. Well, that was unbelievable to me and, well, that was Bob Nolan. If he wanted to be by a stream, he had a cassette and he lay down and he was by a stream! *

So, the respect we had for him… He was one of a kind. He was Bob Nolan and he always will be Bob Nolan and we’ll never have another one of those. We’ll all greatly miss him a lot.

LARRY: Marty, what did, or what do you think you have in common with Bob?

MARTY: Well, see, I feel the same way about Nature as Bob Nolan but I had never written songs about Nature except the one song, Man Walks Among Us. And what I liked about Bob was a lot of his songs was about Nature and a lot of his songs was just the cowboy songs, campfire-type songs. Well, that’s different from what I wrote because mine was about gunfighters and killings, you know, and things like that. The last time I saw him we exchanged a few songs.

I sang to Bob on the way back from the recording session. I had my guitar and we were in the back seat of the car and I sang a song that I recorded in an album called All Around Cowboy called The Dreamer. He loved that song so much, he cried. It really made me feel.... You know, it put goosebumps on my arms to see the tears coming to his eyes while I was singing it because it’s kind of like a song like he would write. Because it had no fighting in it it was just a story about a young man that left home and came back seventeen years later to find his mother and father had passed away and he was just a dreamer and a drifter. And I really believe that’s what Bob was—a dreamer and a drifter. Although he, you know, didn’t do a lot of drifting, he certainly had to be a dreamer to do the songs that he did.

LARRY: On June 16, 1980, Bob Nolan made his final stand. And as always, Time won. Time has won against others before him - the Farr Brothers, Pat Brady, Lloyd Perryman, and Tim Spencer. Only the last Pioneer, Roy Rogers, remains to tell the story of those days. Memories grow dim with time but we still have the recordings and the films to keep those memories alive.

Need we say more? Very little. Fashions in music like, all fashions, change in time. Most fashion is ephemeral and becomes only a curiosity of the past, but there are fashions that transcend. The music of the Sons of the Pioneers is not just of the B Westerns, and transcribed radio shows and old songs on dusty albums around the house. The music of the Sons of the Pioneers is a unique heritage. Their performances have made immortal the traditional songs of the West and those written about the West by more contemporary composers. The music of the Sons of the Pioneers is less a fashion and more a treasure; one that gains interest through the years.

* The actual noise heard through the speakers was this: While the cassette recorder was lying by the stream one of singer/western artist Bob Wagner’s horses came over and “snuffled and snorted” right into the microphone.