I want to be a cowboy's sweetheart

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I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart was the first million-seller by a female country artist in the 1935 version by Patsy Montana .

History of the song

Emergence

Before 1935, Patsy Montana had played in various formations, none of which could achieve national significance. She gained her first studio experience on November 4, 1930, when she recorded the tracks When the Flowers of Montana Were Blooming / I Love My Daddy Too (Victor # 23760) as a soloist without any response. Except for some radio recordings for KWKH in Shreveport as a fiddler for Jimmie Davis in 1932, she was initially denied a breakthrough.

In 1934 Montana wrote I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart while on tour , which she then performed on the WLS ( Chicago ) radio station during the weekly National Barn Dance show . The now wider audience was also noticed by the American Record Corporation (ARC), and the label decided to record Patsy Montana and her band Prairie Ramblers in New York City in August 1935 . Her first composition was not accepted by a music publisher until the beginning of 1935.

Nobody's Darling But Mine was recorded on August 15, 1935 , followed by I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart / Ridin 'Old Paint (Vocalion # 3010) on August 16, 1935, which was enriched with longer yodel passages. In August 1935, You Look Pretty in an Evening Gown was recorded.

Record successes

Patsy Montana - Cowboy's Sweetheart (remake on Surf Records November 1959)

The song about the girlfriend of a cowboy, published in December 1935, made it to 10th place on the pop hit parade in January 1936 because there were no independent country charts. Her producer Arthur Satherly chose Cowboy's Sweetheart as the A-side, while Montana was not convinced of her own composition: " The record didn't hit overnight, but its popularity grew slowly and never stopped, " wrote Patsy Montana in her autobiography. She had thereby become the first female star of country music and cultivated the image of a self-sufficient, independent, but country and cowboys adoring cowgirl.

According to ASCAP , the song was covered eleven times, by Patti Page and Lynn Anderson as well as by Dixie Chicks and LeAnn Rimes .

literature

  • Patsy Montana, Jane Frost: Patsy Montana. The Cowboy's Sweetheart. McFarland, Jefferson NC 2002, ISBN 0-7864-1080-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joseph Murrells: Million Selling Records from the 1900s to the 1980s. An illustrated Directory. Arco, New York NY 1985, ISBN 0-668-06459-5 , p. 26.
  2. ↑ ASCAP entry for I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart