Memories from the Homestead: Tin Pan Alley composition becomes Western classic

    Around 1993 my Granny Evelyn introduced me to a cassette featuring Gene Autry's early 1930s Columbia recordings. His unique vocal delivery was almost identical to Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman. Autry would become more involved in Western music going forward and would be referred to as Hollywood's original Singing Cowboy.

     The Autry cassette featured early hits and this is how I heard the cattle country classic, "Take Me Back To My Boots and Saddle." I had no idea it had New York roots, but would soon discover its background and its three composers. Today I'd like to introduce you to Walter Samuels, Leonard Whitcup and Teddy Powell. They wrote several song successes together over the years.

     Walter Gerald Samuels was born on February 2, 1908, in New York City. Studying piano for fifteen years, he became a composer and performer in the mid-1940s. While serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he composed twenty-five battalion songs while in the South Pacific. After the war,  he would compose the musical scores for quite a number of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers films. He died June 3, 1994.

   Leonard Whitcup was also a New York City native, born on October 12, 1903. Remembered as a publisher and composer, Whitcup was also involved for a number years as a show producer, later writing radio scores and Broadway revues. He composed "Shout Wherever You May Be, I Am An American," which was cited in the Congressional Record on  May 5, 1941. It's a powerful number. Whitcup died on April 6, 1979.

     Teddy Raymond Powell was born in Oakland, California, on March 1, 1906. Becoming educated in music and choosing the violin at age eight, he began as a teenage violinist and guitarist for the Abe Lyman Orchestra and would remain with them for seventeen years. In 1939 he became a bandleader and his orchestra made its New York debut that year. Powell would go on to be involved in film and theater work in New York for the rest of his career. Powell died on November 17, 1993, in New York City. 

     In the summer of 1935 Walter Samuels was living at the Hotel Olcott on 72nd Street in New York City. While seated in the rooftop penthouse garden with his wife to be, Ruth Altschul, the idea for a cowboy song came to him and he wrote part of it there on the rooftop. Samuels took the unfinished song to his close friends Teddy Powell and Leonard Whitcup, and they added what the song needed to bring it to completion.

     Feeling they had a hit in their hands, the trio took their song the next day to a number of Tin Pan Alley publishers. Everyone they showed the song to turned it down. By late afternoon they had nearly given up. While taking the subway, they remembered someone else they knew and decided to try one last time.

     Showing up at the publishing office of Bob Miller of Schuster-Miller Inc., it just so happened Miller was still at his office and agreed to hear the new song. Samuels played "Take Me Back To My Boots and Saddle" on the piano and Miller accepted it right then and there. Within three weeks, ten different recordings of the song had been completed!

     Becoming one of the most popular of the 1930s era cowboy songs, "Take Me Back To My Boots and Saddle" made its first Hit Parade appearance on November 16, 1935, and it stayed at the top for eleven weeks straight.

     While in high school, my spare time was spent gathering all of the Sons of the Pioneers RCA recordings,  from the singles, to all the LP records. The Pioneers recorded "Take Me Back To My Boots and Saddle" at RCA's Hollywood studio on Sunset Boulevard on November 17, 1960, with Dale Warren doing the solo, Lloyd Perryman doing the tenor harmony, and Tommy Doss doing the baritone harmony. Karl Farr assisted with lead guitarist parts. It was released as track two on side two of the group's Lure of the West album. I loved their trio yodel and the tight harmony of their arrangement. I've performed the song occasionally in concerts for thirty years.

    Gene Autry's recording of the song led Republic Pictures to capitalize on it further by releasing the Autry film "Boots and Saddles" in 1937. Autry would feature it for much of his career.

    Other versions that were popular were recorded by Jimmy Wakely,  Bing Crosby, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, and in recent years versions have been popular by R.W. Hampton and Riders in the Sky. Check out these versions on YouTube, and you'll discover how this great song has remained a classic of the West.