Gene Autry, perhaps the greatest singing cowboy of all time,
was born on September 29, 1907, in Tioga, Texas.
While still a boy, Autry moved with his family to a ranch in
Oklahoma where he learned to play the guitar and sing.
The young Autry was quickly attracted to a new style of music
that was becoming popular at the time, which combined the
traditional cowboy music popular in Texas and Oklahoma and
the folk songs, ballads, and hymns of southern-style country
music.
Known as country-western, the new sound was popularized by musicians from the East Coast and the South who had never
been near a horse and couldn’t tell a stirrup from a lariat.
Donning cowboy hats and boots and affecting what they thought
were western drawls, hundreds of these newly minted “cowboys”
were soon crooning popular western ballads like “Tumbling
Tumble Weeds” all around the nation.
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