I heard a song on the radio the other day that took me way back to the days when westerns dominated the movie screen and the television airwaves.  The song was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Hearing the song immediately put me back in front of the screen reliving scenes from that great movie. 

Got me to thinking about other Cowboy/Western ballads I love – not all of them movie related – and I thought I’d do a list of my top ten favorites for this post.  And for those of you who want to hear them again (or for the first time), I’ll post links to videos that feature them as well.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJMLbyEaPWs&feature=related

High Noon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLvKZ6nIiA

The Streets Of Laredo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L14UKBjC5Is

El Paso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T9OeN3t37Y

Come A Little Bit Closer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu9ZepcV0CM

Big Bad John
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx59fmP7jYE

Ringo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCyuq-ofnPc

Big Iron
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKrXSrqCLY4

Johnny Reb
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VknxL_we6PY

Ballad Of The Alamo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3amU4FqKCqw

And as a bonus, I thought I’d include my 10 favorite western TV classic theme songs as well

Have Gun, Will Travel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgvxu8QY01s&feature=related

Maverick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYrsDT02OcE

Bat Masterson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAdUJrrS7vk

Wyatt Earp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mroOwJDeqkY

Rawhide
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I4uJ4aStmc

Cheyenne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h9rUNf64cw&NR=1

Bronco
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBHbqo9Z2Og&feature=related

Rin Tin Tin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YjMAoDy-jE

Branded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV-7D4io1Rs&feature=related

Bonanza
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjdRgBAY278

So how about you – did I leave one of your favorites off of my lists?  If so – share!

As the old cowboy saying goes, ‘It’s the last thing you take off and the first thing that is noticed.’

Top hats, derbys, tams, fedoras, berets, bowlers – hats do more than cover a man’s head. They make a statement about the wearer.

If I say Bogart, can you see him, fedora pulled down low, collar turned up?

Or Charlie Chaplin in his bowler?

How about President Abraham Lincoln?

Or Sean Connery in his Panama?

Hats say a lot about the personality of the man – and some, like President Lincoln’s black stovepipe hat, will be forever linked with the man who wore it.

I believe the most recognizable type of hat, hands down, is the cowboy hat.

Did you see John Wayne in The Quiet Man and wonder where the heck his Stetson was?

There, that’s better.

How about the hat Clint Eastwood wore in Pale Rider?

John Stetson was the creator of what we think of today as the cowboy hat. The son of a master hatter, John made his first cowboy hat as a demonstration to his buddies about making felt from fur. The wide-brimmed hat was so useful in keeping off the sun and rain, his companions wanted one of their own. And an empire was born.

Stetson started his company in 1865. By 1866, the “Hat of the West” or “Boss of the Plains” set the John B. Stetson Company on the path to becoming the most famous hat in the world. Originally sold in one grade (2 ounce felt) and one color (natural), that original Stetson hat sold for five dollars. The equivalent hat today would cost close to $1,000.

Check out these two Montana dudes (1885) in their brand new Stetson ‘Boss of the Plains.’ The guy on the left is wearing Levi’s.

Made of a blend of rabbit, wild hare and beaver fur, today’s Stetson sets the mark for cowboy hats. You can get your Stetson in felt or straw, black, white, grey, tan; choose your style, for casual or dress, for outside wear or for going to church.

If you want to see how these famous hats are made, visit StetsonHats.com and click on the “The Making of a Stetson Hat” from the list on the left.

Stetson isn’t the only hat maker in the U.S. In Dallas in 1927, the Byer-Rolnick company began making the Resistol hats, so named because they were made to “resist all weather.”

But Stetson is the name most associated with the west.

Here’s some eye-candy, just because.

“Even after the wild aspect of the West was somewhat tamed, the cowboy hat never really lost its ability to lend that reckless and rugged aura to its wearer.”

Please start by telling us a little about yourself.

 I jokingly call myself the World’s Greatest Literary Janitor, when it comes to the career of Louis L’Amour my job has basically been to organize what he left behind in order to extend his career twenty years or so.  That meant going through virtually every piece of paper that he left behind searching for clues with which I could recreate various aspects of his life for Bantam Books, our web sites and, occasionally, the movie industry.

 On the personal side I’m just guy who lives in a little house in Los Angeles, creates fun projects to do with his friends, likes traveling, reading, and messing around with old cars.  This is beginning to sound like one of those dating site profiles …I’ll move on.

 Your father is famous for living a lot of the life he wrote about, was this true by the time you were able to remember him or did he live a more sedate desk bound life after his books started coming out.

 Louis never lived the life of a cowboy, though he was a miner and worker on a number of farms.   Much of this was done in a period, the 1920s, that had a greater resemblance to the frontier west than our world of today and some of the people who had lived in that earlier time were still alive.  However, it was a time that had it’s own fascinating aspects … I always wished Louis had written more about his own time.

 Once he settled down in Los Angeles right after World War Two most of that lifestyle was in the past.  By the time I came along Louis was fairly tied to his desk by the responsibility of supporting a family.  Writing, in those days, didn’t pay particularly well.  To live a relatively middle class lifestyle and prepare for problems that the future … protracted unemployment was always a risk … Dad had to write three to four books a year.  It was quite a load of work.

I have to ask, as a writer myself, how did your dad manage all these books without a computer? I am profoundly impressed. I do so much editing and revising and it would be so much harder with a typewriter. I feel like a pure wimp, but I find writers who produced as much work as your dad did especially impressive because they didn’t have computers. . .don’t even ask about James Fenimore Cooper and Jane Austen without even a typewriter. Did he tear out pages and throw them away and start over and scribble on the pages a lot? Did he write his books longhand first then transcribe it to a typewriter? Did he talk his books and have a secretary?  

Louis learned to write by trying to sell to the pulp magazines.  The pay was usually between $25 to $250 a story … and many, many, stories didn’t sell.  He set a goal of writing a story a week in those days so there wasn’t much time for rewriting or even over thinking them.  I’m sure that in the early days, long before I was born, he threw out a great many pages.  Later, however, he perfected a manner of “stream of consciousness” writing that allowed him to produce an incredible number of stories but at the cost of losing some of his ability to rewrite.  Perhaps a more accurate way of saying that would be that ‘he lost some of his will to rewrite’ … he was not so inclined to think about what he was writing, he made it more of a reaction than an intellectual process.  That delivered a boiling energy to his work but left some of it sort of rough around the edges.  Take a look at some of the writing in Yondering, stories that were highly polished in order to be sold in literary magazines, then compare them to many of the pulp westerns, where speed of production was of the essence.  There is a difference.

 Dad wrote a minimum of five pages a day, using two fingers, on a typewriter.  He wrote six to ten hours a day, six to seven days a week for most of his adult life.  At his best he could do sixty words a minute for a pretty extended amount of time.  Most of the trick though, was just sticking to it and never doubting that what he was doing was right, the right scene, the right dialogue, whatever.

Did your dad travel to research his books? I’m wondering if you had adventures as a child that stemmed from having Louis L’Amour as a father.

 Sometimes.  Mostly he was already aware of the locations he wanted to use from his own, earlier, travels,  But we did research on many of our trips and, later on, I did research for him on my own.  My sister and I saw a lot of dirt roads when we were kids.

Have you met the actors and actresses who have performed in movie’s based on his books, like Tom Selleck and Sam Elliot?

 I have had the privilege of working with both of those guys but meeting people or working with them and knowing them are two different things.  I’ve tended to leave the celebrity types to themselves as much as possible.  Some are really nice people.  Some are absolute jerks.  In my opinion, nothing about being a movie star is wonderful or interesting.  Quite a few live difficult lives and are often not really the kind of people that you’d want to hang around with once the novelty of their being famous wore off. 

 That said there is a great difference between stars, who tend to exist in a bubble of fear and alienation, and a great number of actors, some of whom are my closest friends.  It’s amazing how many actors, who often get a bad rap based upon a few of the worst examples, are alert, intelligent, people who are amazingly hard workers and able to both do so many different things and to train themselves in new disciplines at the drop of a hat.  I really count myself lucky.

And how involved are you with current work on the books.

 I had been involved with production of our dramatized audios from the start.  For years we have done a series of audio books in a style similar to old time radio dramas … I use that term loosely because most of our productions do not try to be nostalgic or the least bit “old timey.”  Anyway, I was in charge of the scripting and casting of the vast majority of those shows, each needing a script that was an adaptation of the original story rather than a dogmatically faithful transcription.  Prose does not automatically make the best drama, just like including back and forth, script style dialogue in a novel or short story could be a mistake.  Prose is a visual art, more like painting than good drama … and drama is usually more auditory, even in the movies.  I also wrote and directed several of our audio dramas … in fact I’m at work editing the most recent, number seventy, I believe, even as I answer these questions. 

 For awhile I was doing six a year but now production has slowed considerably and we do only one every several years, however, the stories are much longer and the productions vastly more involved.  This production is an audio of one of my dad’s movies that I produced several years ago, The Diamond of Jeru.  It has been a wonderful opportunity to revisit that script and evolve it into something new and different.  In a way it is as much of an adaptation of that film as the film was of the novella.  I don’t know when it will be released, we only get about a week a month to work on these and we have to take the end of the year off as Christmas is our big sales time at louislamour.com.  We are two years in and only about half done. 

Back to the books.  Starting with Haunted Mesa I began to be involved with doing some of Louis’s research and then occasionally doing some minor editing.  After his death the work expanded to planning how to re-present the entire catalogue of his works, to art directing a new set of covers, rewriting all the jacket copy, and editing or rewriting many of the unpublished or unfinished short stories.  My friend for many years, Paul O’Dell and I run the louislamour.com website and have created hundreds of pages of material on Louis and his stories.  Our latest creation is Louis L’Amour’s Great Adventures, a website featuring all of Louis’s writing in the adventure genre and an examination of the world that the stories were written in.  It’s full of Paul’s amazing art and maps and photos from the time period … many straight from Louis’s own archives.  Also of note is louislamourslosttreasures.com, and ongoing project to catalogue many of Louis’s partially completed projects, false starts, and alternative versions of many of his published works.

I see that you’re a writer and involved in many ways in the film industry. How has being Louis L’Amour’s son helped? How as it hurt?

 Being Louis’s son has helped because I inherited a catalogue of material that was already famous … it would seem that might make it easier to sell than my original material.  Certainly studios and networks would rather talk about material written by my dad … at the same time they don’t really want to make westerns, so the whole situation is sort of self limiting.  That said, I only occasionally work in film and don’t need to go there to earn a living so it’s not really a problem.  When I want to do drama, work with actors and script and such I can do an audio.  I love film but the business is very dysfunctional and time consuming … I’m glad I have publishing.  Really glad.

I am a huge fan of all the L’Amour books and I don’t think I’ve missed a single one.

My personal favorite is The Sackett Brand. Here’s a bit about it (for the Petticoats & Pistols readers) I found on http://www.louislamour.com/ .

 Forty gunslingers from the Lazy A have got Tell Sackett cornered under the Mogollon Rim. They’re fixing to hang him if they can capture him alive, fill him extra full of lead if they can’t.

It’s just about the best of the best in my opinion. I consider however, Jubal Sackett to be, again in my opinion, his epic story. I just loved that book. I have a question about it.

In Jubal Sackett. . .when Jubal went into that cave and saw those dead bodies and heard the words, “Find them. . .” I have ALWAYS been crazed to know what that meant. Find WHO?????

Any ideas? Even guesses would be appreciated. Was it something Louis was going to go into in a later book? Is it in Jubal Sackett and I somehow missed it?

 It was a set up for the future but I don’t know where he was going with it.  If that drove you crazy you really love Louis L’Amour Treasures.  It’s hundreds of mysteries wrapped in riddles.  Take a look …

 Beau L’Amour

And go to http://www.louislamour.com/ to find specially bound editions of Louis L’Amour’s classic novels.

I don’t know about you, but it’s HOT in Nebraska! How hot is it?

It’s so hot, I went to the store for flour, sugar and eggs yesterday, and came home with a cake.

Bada boom, bada bing.

Seriously, it’s summer, and we have three birthdays to celebrate just this month. Our family has grown so much that it’s a rare month that doesn’t find us gathering for cake at least a couple of times. I love to get creative and serve brunch, with breakfast casseroles, etc. My daughter LeighAnn and I occasionally cook up Mexican Day or Soup Day. But of course, with such a large gathering, we often have the old standbys, grilled burgers and dogs, Tastees, chili, and on the holidays, good old ham and turkey.

I don’t know how I always get the same jobs at these events—but I’m trying to shake off the stereotype. My son-in-law Brad claims he’s going to have me buried with an ice cream scoop in my folded hands, so I’ll look normal. I bought him one for Christmas one year—a dandy specimen just like mine—a heavy-duty industrial strength flat scooper—but of course I am the one who wields it at their house. Last birthday there I tried to hide until the scooping was underway, but they found me.

My goodness, but those birthdays pile up, don’t they? When we moved last time, I organized photos into albums until my brain went numb. I finally stashed the rest back into boxes where they will await the next millennium. It was amazing how many of those photos were pictures of cakes. If you’re a young mom, take this as a gentle suggestion: Take ONE photo of the baby’s cake. One, got it?

I remember how exciting those first birthday cakes were. If you’re a mom of many or a grandma, you remember, too. You couldn’t get enough pictures of your baby with frosting up his nose. Wasn’t that darling? Then there were second, third, and fourth birthdays. And then the second third and fourth kids arrived and had birthdays, too—yes I have four children and I lived to tell. And then the grandchildren start arriving—or so they say.

Here is my pledge: I will never, as long as I draw breath, take another picture of a birthday cake. I mean how many cake pictures does a person need? Get them out of order, and you don’t even know whose cake it was or which year. And you know, one shot is never enough. Admit it, you take two pictures in case the first one blurs or something. Heaven forbid we wouldn’t be able to see Strawberry Shortcake or Spiderman clearly once he was only a sweet memory.

You know what I’m talking about. Just you try sorting 20 or 30 years of photos and try to get sentimental about a cake that was only so so in 1983.

And while I’m on the subject of parties, darned if I’m not the one who inevitably gets stuck opening all those toys that have been hermetically sealed and wired and clamped. Sometimes I need a screwdriver and a wire cutter to extricate them. I’m telling you, Santa could catapult those boxes out of his sleigh onto our concrete driveway and Barbie wouldn’t have a hair out of place. Her hair is sewn onto the cardboard, people. Sewn.

The packaging is three times the size of the toy inside. It takes half a roll of wrapping paper to go around a box, but once you get the twisties unwrapped and the taped peeled off and the plastic removed, you have a tiny little pile of Power Rangers and half a dozen bags of trash. And—

Have you ever lost a minuscule part and had to search through all those bags because you might have accidentally thrown it away? Or heaven forbid go out to the trashcan—I don’t know which is worse, searching through trash for Woody’s six-shooter in the summer or during the winter. Hint: the piece is never there. It’s always with Colonel Mustard in the sofa cushion.

How about you? Do most of your family traditions involve food?

This blog had nothing to do with reading, writing or watching westerns, but I do have a fun drawing this month to bring the focus back on everybody’s favorite subject (besides cake) and that would be cowboys.

Leave a comment today and I’ll drop your name into the fish bowl. I’m holding a drawing for this DVD set: COWBOYS OF THE SILVER SCREEN. Five full-length feature films:

Over the Hill Gang – Walter Brennan and Ricky Nelson

The Shooting – jack Nicholson, Warren Oates

Vengeance Valley – Burt Lancaster, Joanna Dru

Rage at Dawn – Forrest Tucker, Randolph Scott

One-eyed Jacks, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden

I’m adding a cowboy boot charm to the prize, too. Now, wouldn’t winning this set just take the cake?

How did I first become interested in Western romance?   I could answer that question in two words—but first let me give you some background.  In my growing up years, my dad subscribed to some great men’s magazines, like TRUE and SPORTS AFIELD.  They were filled with action and adventure, and I read them from cover to cover.  I even enjoyed the ads, especially the ad that showed a long line of books with titles like RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE and LIGHT OF THE WESTERN STARS and a banner that read: “GET THE ENTIRE THE ZANE GREY COLLECTION!” 

By the time I fell under Zane Grey’s spell, that author had long since ridden into life’s sunset.  But his books were still bestsellers, and our local library had an entire shelf of them.  I was in sixth grade when I started reading them.  Not sure how many I got through, but I do remember how they fired my young imagination with vistas of raw beauty and rugged characters who were bigger than life. 

Pearl Zane Grey was born in 1872 in Zanesville, Ohio,  where he grew up reading adventure stories and dime novels.  He wanted to be a writer, but his father, a dentist with a violent temper, had other ideas.  When Zane wrote his first story at fifteen, his father tore it up and beat him.   Eventually the young man bowed to his father’s wishes, became a dentist and married a girl from a wealthy family.  At night, to relieve the tedium of his day job, he wrote stories.  His first efforts were awkward, but with the help of his wife Dolly, who edited his work and most likely financed the publication of his first novel, he slowly began to find success. 

Grey had inherited his father’s turbulent nature.  He was given to spells of anger and sank into despair when his work was rejected.  Restless to a fault, he was a deplorable husband and father, often staying away for months, traveling, hunting and fishing, and spending time with mistresses, while Dolly managed the household and raised their three children.  Dolly tolerated her husband’s lifestyle as she proofed his work and handled the business end of his growing literary career.  Their letters indicate that there was genuine love and respect between them.  

Grey’s early books were about the American Revolution.  After a hunting trip to Arizona he began to write the Westerns that would make him famous.  On his wilderness trips he took photographs and wrote copious notes.  Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone-chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to him.   From the beginning, vivid description was the strongest aspect of his writing.  Grey’s first Western, THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT, became a bestseller.  Two years later he produced his best known book, RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, his all-time best seller and one of the most successful Western novels ever.  After that he became a household name.  In 1918 he moved his family from Pennsylvania to California, where he started his own movie production company.  He lived there on and off until his death in 1939 at the age of 67. 

Grey became one of the first millionaire authors. He connected with millions of readers worldwide and inspired many Western writers who followed him. Zane Grey was a major force in shaping the myths of the Old West and he helped transition the written Western into other media. He was the author of over 90 books, some published posthumously and/or based on serials originally published in magazines. His total book sales exceed 40 million  From 1917–1926, Grey was in the top ten best-seller list nine times, which required sales of over 100,000 copies each time.  Even after his death, his publisher had a stockpile of manuscripts and continued to publish a new title each year until 1963. 

Another great writer, Erle Stanley Gardner, would say that Grey  “had the knack of tying his characters into the land, and the land into the story…Somehow you got the impression that the bigness of the country generated a bigness of character.” 

What sparked your early interest in the West?  Do you have a favorite author?  A favorite story or film? 

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