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THERE AREN’T MANY authentic folk singers who sing genuine folk songs but Tex Ritter is one of them. He has been one for over 40 years, and his screen career as “a singing cowboy” is second in importance only to Gene Autry’s.

He was born in 1905 on a 400-acre farm near Murvaul, in eastern Texas, and was christened Woodward Maurice. Not all of his ancestors, who went to Texas from Alabama and Tennessee, had farmed the Texas land. There had been several lawmen – sheriffs and deputy sheriffs among them.

After graduating from South Park High School in Beaumont, Ritter entered the University of Texas in Austin with the intention of becoming a lawyer. But he became president of the University’s glee club and through this became acquainted with Frank Dobie, one of our fore most authorities on the West. “Dobie played a large part,” Ritter said recently, “in making me what I am to day.”

Economic reasons obliged him to leave the university and for two years he worked at a variety of jobs including one in a steel mill. However, Dobie had inspired him to collect cowboy, mountain and Negro songs and a radio station in Houston (KPRC) hired him to sing authentic cowboy ballads on a 30-minute program once a week. He became the first major singer of Western songs on US radio. His library of folk songs now constitutes one of the largest collections of such material in the US.

His success on radio led to his joining a band that specialized in Western music and played one-night stands throughout the South and Mid-West. While performing with it in Chicago he decided to take another crack at studying law and he enrolled in Northwestern University in nearby Evanston. But after a year of it he found he missed singing to people and realized he probably should go on the stage. He left Northwestern for New York and arrived there just as the Depression was deepening (’30).

He landed a job in the Theatre Guild’s production of Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs, the play which was later transformed into Oklahoma! He sang four songs and understudied Franchot Tone, who had the lead role (Curly McClain). He was at first billed as Woodward Ritter but the Theatre Guild brass, earning that cast, stagehands and everyone else called him Tex, decided to capitalize on all that syllable connoted and bill him as Tex Ritter.

Ritter’s appearance in Green Grow the Lilacs led to his being invited by colleges and universities to sing, and talk, about the American cowboy. He has always enjoyed this sort of engagement.”

Early in ’32 he was cast as “Sage Brush Charlie” in the stage production called The Roundup, and received far better notices than the show itself. Said John Mason Brown: “You forget the dullness of its melodrama when Tex Ritter, who has an exceptionally winning personality, is emitting cowboy yells or registering embarrassment as Sage Brush Charlie.”

The Roundup did not last but by the time it closed Ritter had become the star of the radio program called “Lone Star Rangers,” on which he sang cowboy ballads and spun tales of the West. And he undertook other radio assignments: he emceed a barn-dance program for NYC’s Station WHN; did dramatic roles in such radio shows as “Gang Busters,’ “ENO Crime Clues,” “Bobby Benson,” “Maverick Jim” and “Death Valley Days;” had a radio program of his own called “Tex Ritter’ Campfire.” Then, with George Martin and Joseph Shunatona (a Pawnee Indian), he created, and co-starred in, the radio show called “Cowboy Tom’s Roundup” that ran for three years and was one of the Easter Seaboard’s most popular radio programs for children.

Republic Pictures’ success with Gene Autry as a singing cowboy led other producers to endeavor to imitate it and Edward Finney, who was then connected with Grand National Films and knew of Ritter’s success on Broadway and radio, signed him to a contract. Said Finney 30 years later: “Tex is one of the most talented men I’ve ever met and a wonderful human being.”

The contract was signed in September ’36 and before the year was out Tex had made two films: SONG OF THE GRINGO and HEADIN’ FOR THE RIO GRANDE. Said “American Youth”: “There have been 150 Westerns this year and most of them have been of the typical ‘shoot-em-up’ variety. But 1936 has also seen the beginning of a new type of Western – those with a singing star and lighter moments. Foremost among the singing Westerners is Tex Ritter.”

Ritter made 13 Westerns for Grand National and the plot of the last one (THE UTAH TRAIL) turned on an idea he supplied: cattle rustlers make their getaway by means of a train that disappears. The gimmick was successfully executed on the screen and THE UTAH TRAIL was so talked about “Ranch Romances” turned the film into a novel.

In ’38 Finney moved to Monogram Pictures and took Ritter with him. Their first three pictures for Monogram did so well that that company, never known for lavishness, doubled the budget for Tex Ritter films. Indeed, ROT/IN’ WESTWARD, DOWN THE WYOMING TRAIL and WESTBOUND STAGE are among the best Westerns Monogram ever did. Tex himself thinks he was “at my peak at Monogram and some of my best pictures were made there.”

However, he left Monogram “for more money.” It was offered by Columbia, which teamed him with “Wild Bill” Elliott in eight pictures. No screen team has ever worked more harmoniously. Tex knew Elliott before they worked together, for, in ’41, he married one of Elliott’s leading ladies, Dorothy Fay Southworth, by whom he has had two sons (Thomas and Jonathan).

The wedding took place in Mrs. Ritter’s hometown of Prescott, Arizona. In nearby Skull Valley Ritter saw, and bought, a pure white colt with perfect white markings which he rode throughout the last five years he was a movie star, and rode in his stage shows thereafter. It accompanied him on his first European tour (’52) and was trained to do all the tricks horses have ever done on the screen. Tex called him “White Flash,” the name he had given to all the horses he rode in Hollywood, but hadn’t owned.

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