An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 14 | COUNTRY MUSIC DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II 345

Similarly, Patsy Montana (Ruby Blevins, from Arkansas) had the fi rst signifi cant

hit record for a solo female country artist with “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweet-

heart” (1935), a lively polka modeled on “Texas Plains”:

I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart

I want to learn to rope and to ride

I want to ride o’er the plains and the desert

Out west of the Great Divide.

Western music catered to a public dissatisfi ed with the harsh economic reali-

ties of life during the Great Depression. Cowboy songs promised escape into a past

that seemed somehow more honest and authentic than modern urban existence.

WESTERN SWING

If movie cowboys purveyed an idealized West for an urban audience, other types

of music emerging from the Southwest refl ected their audiences’ more here-and-

now concerns. Much of this new music came from Texas, western Louisiana,

K This 1947 movie poster gives second billing not to Gene Autry’s love interest, Lynne

Roberts, but to his horse, Champion Jr.

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