Girls of the Golden West

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Girls of the Golden West
General information
Genre (s) Country music , western music
resolution 1963
Founding members
Mildred Fern Good
(April 11, 1913 - May 3, 1993)
Dorothy Laverne Good
(December 11, 1915 - November 12, 1967)

The Girls of the Golden West were an American singing duo. Always dressed in fancy and colorful Western-style outfits, they cultivated their image as singing cowgirls . Accordingly, their repertoire consisted mainly of traditional and self-composed cowboy songs, but also some songs from the field of country music .

Life

Beginnings

The sisters were originally from Mount Carmel , Illinois , but grew up in Mount Vernon , Illinois and St. Louis , Missouri . There they also had their first appearances on the local radio station KNOX. Since they didn't like the fact that their real family name “Goad” sounded like either “Goat” or “Gold” on the radio, they changed it to “Good” without further ado. At the suggestion of a station employee, they finally adopted their stage name, which is a homage to the English title of the 1910 opera La fanciulla del West (English: "The girl from the golden west") by Giacomo Puccini and in turn on one Short story by Bret Harte and the play by David Belasco is based.

After a short interlude at the "border station" XER, they finally switched to WLS in Chicago in 1933 , where they quickly became popular members of the National Barn Dance . In the WLS Family Album , a promotional yearbook, they were referred to as real cowgirls from a Texas nest called "Muleshoe"; a legend that they maintained later because they found the idea and above all the name particularly amusing.

Career

At WLS, the two sisters met Gene Autry , with whom they also went on tour. Autry's friend and longtime "sidekick" Smiley Burnette encouraged them to try their hand at their own compositions and helped them with their first song, Two Cowgirls on the Lone Prairie . During this time they also developed their unmistakable clothing style, for the most part they tailored their blouses and skirts, which are richly decorated with fringes and appliqués, themselves. Together with film cowboys like Autry or Roy Rogers , they shaped the typical western style of this era (the one in stark Contradiction to the clothing of the real cowboys), which would later rub off on numerous country musicians.

In 1937 they left WLS and went to WLW in Cincinnati , Ohio , where they appeared on shows such as Renfro Valley Barn Dance , Boone County Jamboree, and Midwestern Hayride . After the audience's enthusiasm for the Singing Cowboys gradually dried up at the end of the 1940s, the girls' careers also came to an end; In 1949 they had their last live performance. In 1963 they made some more recordings for the Texan Bluebonnet label.

In addition to their appearances on the radio and at touring concerts, they also made numerous recordings, first in July 1933 for Bluebird Records , later for ARC (until 1938). While they initially mainly recorded traditional cowboy songs in addition to ballads from the American Southwest, the emphasis increasingly shifted towards their own compositions such as Silvery Moon on the Golden Gate , which should become their trademark. In 1938 the cowboy share was about half of her recordings.

They always stayed true to their singing style: two-part harmony singing, accompanied on the guitar and enriched with virtuoso yodelling. In terms of style, they were sometimes more similar to the brother duos of that time, such as the Delmore Brothers or the Blue Sky Boys . Due to their outward appearance and the selection of their songs, however, they were rather attributed to the Western faction.

In the music business, which was still dominated by men at the time, the girls became role models and pioneers for female artists, especially for duos like the Davis Sisters .

literature

  • Charles K. Wolfe: Classic Country: Legends of Country Music , Oxford (UK): Routledge, 2000, pp. 258 ff. ISBN 978-0415928267
  • Douglas B. Green: Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy , Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002, pp. 61 f. ISBN 0-8265-1412-X

Web links