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

5. “Western as Hell”: 3 Godfathers and Wagon Master

100 chapter 5 Western as Hell” 3 Godfathers and Wagon Master “ With its wall-to-wall symphonic music, heavily dependent upon original composition, 3 Godfathers could scarcely sound much more different from Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Wagon Master also departs significantly from Ford’s earlier westerns: the characteristic folk and period music is largely replaced by originally composed songs performed by Sons of the Pioneers. Of course, 3 Godfathers and Wagon Master have privileged performances of song in common with earlier Ford westerns. And like all of Ford’s westerns, 3 Godfathers and Wagon Master do indeed sound “western as hell,”1 Ford’s evocative description of what he wanted for the music of Wagon Master. But the scores for 3 Godfathers and Wagon Master represent a turn away from those of Stagecoach and especially My Darling Clementine. 3 Godfathers is much more in tune with the conventions of classical Hollywood scoring, and Wagon Master more tapped into contemporary popular music, a phenomenon that was beginning to figure importantly in the genre of the Hollywood western. Part and parcel of understanding Ford’s work after the war is Argosy Pictures, incorporated by Ford and the producer Merian C. Cooper in large part to escape the strictures of the studio system. Argosy is technically credited as the production company on The Long Voyage Home, but it was not until after the war that Argosy was fully capitalized and functioned as an independent production company. Argosy’s first independently produced film, The Fugitive (1947), an arty adaptation of a “Western as Hell” 101 controversial Graham Greene novel, was a commercial and critical disaster and almost sank the fledgling company. Ford and Cooper then turned to a proven moneymaker, the Ford western, and churned out Fort Apache, 3 Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Wagon Master, and Rio Grande in the space of three years.2 In some ways, independent production proved even more inhospitable than the studio system, and Argosy Pictures did not turn out to be the haven from Hollywood’s commercial pressures that Ford had imagined it would be. A dependence upon a reliable genre, the move to color, and the presence of a more conventional film score, including contemporary popular music, all developments in keeping with what the moviegoing public had come to expect, are part of Argosy’s imprint on Ford’s work. In spite of these constraints, Ford produced some of the best and most beloved work of his career with Argosy and the scores for the westerns, although they stray from the pattern of Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine, embody certain Fordian core principles: music to both mark and bind the community, the privileging of song, and the inclusion of Anglo American folk song, period music, and Protestant hymnody. Both 3 Godfathers and Wagon Master were scored by the composer whose name is most indelibly connected to Ford’s, Richard Hageman, who would score six Ford films and collaborate on a seventh, four of them Argosy westerns. He was one of the composing team for Stagecoach , and he also scored The Long Voyage Home, but his preeminent status as a member of Ford’s stock company was established with his score for The Fugitive. In 1946, with the war over and travel across the Atlantic again a possibility, Hageman was determined to sail to Europe, North Africa, and uncharted territory. He claimed to be ready to “free myself from very lucrative Hollywood.” As he wrote to Ford, “The only thing that might tempt me to postpone my . . . sailing would be doing a score for you.”3 At work on James Edward Grant’s Angel and the Badman at the time, Hageman had probably heard that Ford was about to realize his longtime dream of an independent production company and was starting work on what would become The Fugitive. He advised Ford to get “a good free lance man” and avoid “one of those shop worn factory jobs as turned out by most music departments”; if Ford chose not to hire him, Hageman suggested, he should contact “the next best man . . . Louis Gruenberg.” Gruenberg, he said, was “so good . . . that the studio musicians are afraid of him. He does not depend on Hollywood for his 102 “Western as Hell” bread and butter, having pretty much of a world reputation.”4 That world reputation was not turning out...