The Sons of the Pioneers' Lucky "U" Ranch and the Singing Cowboy in Cold War America

On November 5, 1951, the Sons of the Pioneers—a cowboy vocal group that had enjoyed nearly two decades as stars of radio, recordings, and films—premiered The Lucky "U" Ranch, a daily thirty-minute radio program that featured the group's precise ensemble singing and intricate barbershop-style harmonies as well as comic skits and segments that encouraged audience participation. Originating from Los Angeles radio station KECA and syndicated on the ABC and Mutual-DonLee radio networks, The Lucky "U" Ranch was on the air for nearly two years, coinciding with the height of postwar anticommunist paranoia known as the Second Red Scare. The show's tenure was also contemporaneous with the explosive growth of television, the decline of radio as a broadcast medium, and, as singing cowboy historian Douglas B. Green has asserted, a dramatic decrease in the popularity and visibility of the singing cowboy throughout the United States.¹ Yet, contrary to Green's analysis, the Sons of the Pioneers not only survived these crises but, in fact, enjoyed a surge in popularity throughout this period, eventually deciding in 1953 to leave the show in order to fulfill an ever-increasing demand for lucrative live performances.²

How, then, did the Sons of the Pioneers turn these dark days into a period of growth, and, more important, why did radio audiences respond so positively to the group when the idiom in which they worked was becoming increasingly marginalized? Recently available acetate transcription discs housed in the Eugene Earle Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Southern Folklife Collection have preserved every episode of The Lucky "U" Ranch from its November 1951 pilot episode to a post-Sons incarnation that debuted in May 1953.³ These more than eight hundred sixteen-inch discs stand as one of the most complete documents of any era in the group's now seven-decade-long career (or, in fact, of nearly any of the singing cowboy artists) and provide a daily account of the ways that the group negotiated changes in the postwar entertainment industry and in American Cold War culture writ large. Although The Lucky "U" Ranch has received scant attention by Sons aficionados and historians of western music, I contend that the program provides a window into one of the most crucial turning points in the ensemble's career and in the history of the singing cowboy more generally.⁴ The Lucky "U" Ranch transcriptions suggest that, through a variety of strategies, the Sons of the Pioneers' broadcasts consciously or unconsciously responded to growing anticommunist sentiments and anxieties about the sanctity of "traditional" American values by promoting the cowboy's moral code as a weapon in the defense of American values and by invoking nostalgic images of the mythic "Old West" and Depression-era popular culture that stood in stark contrast to the increasingly global visions of postwar America.

A careful examination of the rhetoric invoked on the program, the repertoire that the ensemble performed on it, and changing attitudes toward the popular cowboy image in other realms of American popular culture suggests that the singing cowboy of the early 1950s was more than a worn-out pop culture image. Rather, the Sons of the Pioneers' Lucky "U" Ranch broadcasts were part of a broader effort to redefine the cowboy's popular image as both a domestic and foreign symbol of America's strength and compassion that helped to galvanize support for anticommunist activities and programs in the early days of the Cold War.

The Sons of the Pioneers from the Great Depression to the Cold War

The Sons of the Pioneers was founded in the fall of 1933 in Los Angeles by Leonard Slye (later Roy Rogers), Bob Nolan, and Tim Spencer. Known as the Pioneer Trio until early 1934 when a radio announcer changed the group's name, the Sons stood out in the thriving Southern California country music scene, demonstrating a level of musicianship that far exceeded most of the region's groups and trading the well-worn string...