Many associate early western music with the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but America’s first western music craze predates these “singing cowboys” by decades. Written by Tin Pan Alley songsters in the era before radio, the first popular cowboy and Indian songs circulated as piano sheet music and as cylinder and disc recordings played on wind-up talking machines. The colorful fantasies of western life depicted in these songs capitalized on popular fascination with the West stoked by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, and Edwin S. Porter’s film The Great Train Robbery. The talking machine music industry, centered in New York City, used state-of-the-art recording and printing technology to produce and advertise songs about the American West. Talking Machine West brings together for the first time the variety of cowboy, cowgirl, and Indian music recorded and sold for mass consumption between 1902 and 1918. In the book’s introductory chapters, Michael A. Amundson explains how this music reflected the nostalgic passing of the Indian and the frontier while incorporating modern ragtime music and the racial attitudes of Jim Crow America. Hardly Old West ditties, the songs gave voice to changing ideas about Indians and assimilation, cowboys, the frontier, the rise of the New Woman, and ethnic and racial equality. In the book’s second part, a chronological catalogue of fifty-four western recordings provides the full lyrics and history of each song and reproduces in full color the cover art of extant period sheet music. Each entry also describes the song’s composer(s), lyricist(s), and sheet music illustrator and directs readers to online digitized recordings of each song. Gorgeously illustrated throughout, this book is as entertaining as it is informative, offering the first comprehensive account of popular western recorded music in its earliest form.

George-Warren offers the first serious biography in which Gene Autry the legend becomes a flesh-and-blood man--with all the passions, triumphs, and tragedies of a flawed icon.

Shoot: a Loren D. Estleman's Valentino mystery! Valentino, a mild-manner film archivist at UCLA and sometime film detective, is at the closing party for the Red Montana and Dixie Day museum when he is approached by no less than his hero and man-of-the-hour Red Montana, western film and television star. Red tells Valentino that he is being blackmailed over the existence of a blue film that his wife, now known throughout the world as the wholesome Dixie Day and the other half of the Montana/Day power couple, made early in her career. With Dixie on her deathbed, Red is desperate to save her the embarrassment of the promised scandal, and offers Valentino a deal-find the movie, and he can have Red's lost film, Sixgun Sonata, that Red has been hiding away in his archives. Don't accept, and the priceless reel will go up in flames. Feeling blackmailed himself, Valentino agrees and begins to dig. In the surreal world of Hollywood, what is on screen is rarely reality. As he races to uncover the truth before time runs out, his heroes begin their fall from grace. Valentino desperately wants to save Sixgun Sonata...but at what cost? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Border tensions are escalating to bloody violence; terrorist attacks on small-town American citizens and petty squabbles in far-flung locales threaten countless more lives. Welcome to America, circa 1916-1918, and two of the bloodiest conflicts that starkly defined an era. Teenage Hector Lassiter, an aspiring author inspired by propaganda and a siren’s song of throbbing war drums, lies about his age, mounts a horse, and storms across the Mexican border behind General “Black Jack” Pershing and George S. Patton to bring the terrorist and Revolutionary General Pancho Villa to justice. Soon, the still underage Hector is shipped off to the bloody trenches of France, fighting the so-called “War to End All Wars” where he meets fellow novelists-in-waiting John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. Once A World is a love story at once epic and intimate; a portrait of the artist, and his country of birth, at a defining moment in their storied history. Edgar, Anthony and Macavity Awards finalist Craig McDonald, author of the internationally bestselling Hector Lassiter series, delivers an adventure novel and historical thriller for the still-uncertain 21st Century. Praise for Craig McDonald: “The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don’t take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He’s wily, talented and—rarest of the rare—a true original. I am always eager to see what he’s going to do next.” —Laura Lippman “With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance.” —Megan Abbott “Nobody does mad pulp history like Craig McDonald. Reading a Hector Lassiter novel is like having a great uncle pull you aside, pour you a tumbler of rye, and tell you a story about how the 20th century really went down.” —Duane Swierczynski “A writer of truly unique voice, approach and ambition.” —Michael Koryta

Los Angeles, 1921: Ex-Pinkerton Charlie Siringo is living in quiet retirement when Wyatt Earp knocks on his door and asks him to track down his missing horse. Horse thievery turns into a deeper mystery as Siringo and another ex-Pinkerton, the young Dashiell Hammett, follow clues from the streets of Los Angeles to Jack London's farm -- until they discover a conspiracy masterminded by the notorious and powerful Joseph P. Kennedy. These ragtime cowboys chase the truth in a compelling tale of the Old West and early Hollywood.

A comprehensive film guide featuring films and television shows of the great American western. The stories of the men and women who tamed the old West. Also featuring actors and directors who made these films possible.

In this slim, lively book our foremost historian of country music recalls the lost worlds of pioneering fiddlers and pickers, balladeers and yodelers. As he looks at "hillbilly" music's pre-commercial era and its early popular growth through radio and recordings, Bill C. Malone shows us that it was a product not only of the British Isles but of diverse African, German, Spanish, French, and Mexican influences.

Following Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the birth and growth of the pop culture West in the context of American history, noted expects explore developments in popular western fiction, major forms of live western entertainment, trends in western movies and television shows, images of the West in popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and advertising.

Born in 1894 in Greer County, Texas—which became part of Oklahoma Territory two years later—Ike Rude would go on to have one of the most remarkable rodeo careers ever recorded. His storied life would include a performance for the Queen of England; acquaintances with the likes of Will Rogers, Gene Autry, and Slim Pickens; multiple world titles; and the near-miss of a championship bid in roping—at age 77. Along the way, he worked for some of the most famous ranches in the west, such as Texas’ JA and Matador ranches and the Chiricahua and Double Circle ranches in Arizona. Rude’s story also includes the many outstanding horses he rode and trained, like the famed Baldy, considered perhaps the greatest roping horse of all time. The career of Ike Rude—and that of several of his horses—is commemorated in nine museums, including the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City and the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame and Museum of the American Cowboy in Colorado Springs. Lovingly woven from archival and family records as well as interviews with Rude by his daughter, Sammie Rude Compton, and closing with an essay on Rude and his rodeo and ranching context by Michael R. Grauer, McCasland Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, this biography of one of the formative figures in the sport offers valuable glimpses into the development of rodeo and cowboy culture. The Cowboy Ike Rude: Riding into the Wind is sure to be a favorite of anyone interested in the colorful lives of working cowboys and rodeo performers in the early twentieth century.

Depicts the suspenseful Old West rivalry between a legendary Wells Fargo chief of detectives and a notorious stagecoach robber who between heists poses as an upper-class San Francisco gentleman.