How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford

1. How the West Was Sung: Music in the Life and Films of John Ford

There were two pianos in the Ford household, but neither John Ford nor anyone else in his immediate family played them.1 Among the notable directors of Hollywood’s classical studio era, Ford took the most active and sustained control of the music for his films, and yet he couldn’t read music, he couldn’t play an instrument, and he sang aloud only when drunk (and then only Irish songs), his grandson Dan told me.2 Yet professional musicians listened to what he had to say about the music. Much is made and rightly so of Ford’s extraordinary visual sense, an eye for composition that seldom failed him. Ford had a musical sense, too, an instinctive feeling for when to use music and an encyclopedic knowledge of what music to use. For the westerns, he liked folk songs, nineteenthcentury popular tunes, and Protestant hymnody. Ford treated music in much the same way he treated dialogue: pared it down to its essence, eliminated the irrelevant, and delivered it simply and without affectation. Such a minimalist approach, of course, depends upon choosing exactly the right line of dialogue and exactly the right piece of music. Repeatedly, and with a remarkable consistency, given Hollywood’s mode of production , this is what Ford was able to do. Born John Martin Feeney in 1894 (although he claimed otherwise) near Portland, Maine, to Irish immigrant parents, John Ford was the youngest of six surviving children. A sensitive child, and a reader, he was also a tough football player who earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Maine. After a difficult entry into college life, Jack “Bull” 9 chapter 1 How the West Was Sung Music in the Life and Films of John Ford Feeney followed his brother Frank to Hollywood. Billed as Francis Ford (it was Frank who adopted the less ethnic surname), Frank had become a silent film actor and director. Eventually, he founded his own production company. He was thus in a position to provide his brother with an apprenticeship in the business, and he did. Jack Ford began directing in 1917. A reversal of fortunes visited the Ford brothers in the 1920s. Under the tutelage of the cowboy star Harry Carey, Jack produced a series of successful contemporary westerns, and, as John Ford, was catapulted to international acclaim for The Iron Horse. Frank was plagued by domestic woes, alcoholism, and business problems and hit bottom. He would find work as a character actor in his brother’s films for the rest of his life. Ford plugged away through the transition to sound and eventually became Twentieth Century–Fox’s most dependable director. With a string of critical and box office successes in the late 1930s and 1940s, he was Hollywood’s most prestigious filmmaker, winning four Academy Awards as Best Director, and two more for his documentaries, a total unmatched to this day. Powerful, difficult, and cantankerous, he worked within the studio system but managed to go his own way nonetheless, butting heads with studio executives but generally thriving in Hollywood . It would be 1939 before he returned to the westerns that had been his entry into the industry and made Stagecoach, a film in which he cast his young friend John Wayne. Westerns would be a central thread in the fabric of Ford’s opus, and several of his last films were westerns, but he never won an Academy Award for his work in the genre by which he is now defined. Any book that devotes itself to the work of a single director needs to confront its own assumptions about authorship and at very least make them explicit for its readers. The field of film studies has been marked since its inception as an academic discipline in the 1960s by auteurism, a romantic and powerful definition of the director as a visionary artist and the source of filmic meaning. Not all directors were deemed auteurs, only those who were able to leave their personal imprint on a film. Ford was fairly early on championed as an auteur; Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema (1968) placed him in his legendary pantheon of directors ,3 and there is a prodigious industry still devoted to this view of Ford today.4 Auteur status was largely equated with control over the mise-en-scène in these early formulations, influenced no doubt by Cahiers du cinema, the journal in whose pages the notion of the director 10 How the...