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

3. “Based on American Folk Songs”: Scoring the West in Stagecoach

49 chapter 3 Based on American Folk Songs” Scoring the West in Stagecoach The opening credits for Stagecoach announce intriguingly that the musical score is “based on American Folk Songs.” It was not a particularly obvious proclamation to make in 1939, the year Stagecoach was produced . Although there are some exceptions, notably Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936),1 the vast majority of westerns at the time were B pictures, series westerns designed for the bottom of a double bill.2 They were filled with the country-and-western music that was proving so popular on the radio and records. Stagecoach, part of the wave of A westerns that revived the genre as a prestige product, turned to another kind of musical heritage. How and why did folk song come to be regarded as the quintessential American musical form? How did it find its way into the western, replacing the music that had come to be associated with the genre? Ford had always liked American folk song, hymnody, and period music and used them in his Americana films of the 1930s, such as Judge Priest and Steamboat Round the Bend, as he had earlier in the silent era. But it was Stagecoach that gave Ford his first opportunity to “score” a sound western. The film not only set a pattern for the way Ford would use music in his westerns, its score, an Academy Award winner, provided an important model for the studio western. My Darling Clementine may have the most Fordian western film score, but it was Stagecoach that blazed the trail. In asserting a connection to American folk song, Stagecoach belonged to the broad cultural convergence of national identity “ 50 “Based on American Folk Songs” and the American West that was to shape both American art music and the genre of the western film. Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Louis Gruenberg, important members of art music circles in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, and among the first wave of composers from the concert world to find film work, provided a road map for film composers seeking ways to identify their music as American. That road map became increasingly important to composers of the western. Because the genre as a whole focuses so transparently on American values, its composers have tended to favor musical forms defined as American. The score of Stagecoach thus found itself part of a defining movement in American art music dedicated to the quest for a national identity that reached Hollywood in the 1930s from East Coast concert halls. The name that may come as a bit of a surprise in the preceding paragraph is that of Louis Gruenberg, perhaps the most important composer of the early twentieth century that you’ve never heard of. Yet Gruenberg literally traversed the trajectory described above: he was a leading figure in New York in the movement to discover and promote a uniquely American music, insisting upon the necessity of recognizing America’s own indigenous music in order to do so; he moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s to score films; and he was supposed to score Stagecoach. His name remains on the film as one of five composers credited with the music. The search for an American music certainly predated the 1930s. During George Washington’s presidency, William Billings promoted his fugueing tunes as “American music.”3 At the turn of the twentieth century , however, the quest began in earnest as composers experimented with a variety of sources to impart an American flavor to their music, in pieces such as Edward MacDowell’s Suite No. 2 (the “Indian”) in 1896 and Henry F. Gilbert’s Comedy Overture on Negro Themes in 1905. Although the inspiration was European, the idiom romantic, and the authenticity suspect, this American music inaugurated a lively dialogue about national identity in music that was to extend throughout the first half of the twentieth century. At its center was the question of what constituted American music. By the 1920s, composers had decided that the answer was jazz. Jazz was not only a uniquely indigenous American form, it resonated with modernity, giving American composers, who were still largely trained in Europe, the opportunity to use the cutting-edge compositional techniques they had studied. Jazz became the vernacular music of choice. As Krin Gabbard reminds us, the term “jazz” had a rather elastic mean- “Based on American Folk...