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Horse Opera - The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy (Paperback)
Loot Price: R479
Discovery Miles 4 790
You Save: R52
(10%)
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Horse Opera - The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy (Paperback)
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List price R531
Loot Price R479
Discovery Miles 4 790
You Save R52 (10%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In this innovative take on a neglected chapter of film history,
Peter Stanfield challenges the commonly held view of the singing
cowboy as an ephemeral figure of fun and argues instead that he was
one of the most important cultural figures to emerge out of the
Great Depression. The rural or newly urban working-class families
who flocked to see the latest exploits of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers,
Tex Ritter, and other singing cowboys were an audience largely
ignored by mainstream Hollywood film. Hard hit by the depression,
faced with the threat--and often the reality--of dispossession and
dislocation, pressured to adapt to new ways of living, these
small-town filmgoers saw their ambitions, fantasies, and desires
embodied in the singing cowboy and their social and political
circumstances dramatized in "B" Westerns. Stanfield traces the
singing cowboy's previously uncharted roots in the performance
tradition of blackface minstrelsy and its literary antecedents in
dime novels, magazine fiction, and the novels of B. M. Bower,
showing how silent cinema conventions, the developing commercial
music media, and the prevailing conditions of film production
shaped the "horse opera" of the 1930s. Cowboy songs offered an
alternative to the disruptive modern effects of jazz music, while
the series Western--tapping into aesthetic principles shunned by
the aspiring middle class--emphasized stunts, fist fights,
slapstick comedy, disguises, and hidden identities over narrative
logic and character psychology. Singing cowboys also linked
recording, radio, publishing, live performance, and film media.
Entertaining and thought-provoking, Horse Opera recovers not only
the forgotten cowboys of the 1930s but also their forgotten
audiences: the ordinary men and women
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