Last edited: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 12:07 PM
Robert Clarence Nolan
Clarence Robert Nobles
(April 13, 1908 - June 16, 1980)
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER (1908 - 1949)
Maybe clouds fill your skies, maybe tears fill your eyes
But your spirits will rise if you sing!
Singer, songwriter, actor and poet, Bob Nolan was instrumental in creating "Western" music, a uniquely North American art form. Cool Water and Tumbling Tumbleweeds are two of his best-known songs but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Many of his compositions had no root at all in European Folk music or in Country / Cowboy music. They were often pure poetry set to unusual melody - completely original - painting a landscape in music. The new sound caught the public's imagination. Contemporary musicians began to imitate, western movies picked it up and the new genre was popular for thirty years.
Please apply for permission from Calin Coburn to use photos or text.
Decca / Standard Radio Transcriptions
Republic Pictures (for a complete list, see Filmography)
The Classic Sons of the Pioneers Reunited
INTRODUCTION: THE MYTH AND THE MAN
Because Bob Nolan was a private person who preferred solitude to social life he has become something of a mystery. A natural disinclination to explain himself to anybody, plus a propensity for spending long periods of time alone in the mountains or desert, made him a recluse in the minds of his fellow entertainers and historians. On the other hand, nearly sixty years after he left film and stage, he remains a hero to his fans. Hero or recluse - which was he? Both?
His undeniable talent for painting the prairie and desert in simple but powerful words, or putting into verse emotions we all share, set him apart from the average Singing Cowboy of his day. His good looks and good manners romanticized that image still further. His detractors were few.
While men respected him and children and the ladies loved him, those who lived or worked with him longest felt they did not ever really know him. His personality baffled them. His second wife, Clara, was heard to say, "I lived with him for over forty years and I still don't know him." His grandson considered him an ordinary man with extraordinary talent. His daughter felt that he was always searching for something more - a key to life. Roy Rogers, after fifty years, thought that he was unknowable - "Bob was Bob." On the other hand, Lloyd Perryman, expecting nothing of him and accepting everything, was his closest friend.
Knowing a man personally is quite different from trying to meet him through the eyes of his friends and family so I cannot say through this biography that "This is Bob Nolan." I can let his friends speak of him and I can tell you a little about his background but I arrived on the scene far too late to meet him face to face. I began to research his life in 1994 and this fourteen-year distance may have allowed me to be more objective. I hope so. I have faithfully recorded the facts and I will let them speak for themselves. You be the final judge.
People can be uneasy with those they cannot type. Since they did not know just how to label Bob, they called him eccentric, an enigma, a hermit, knowing that none of those tags quite fit. According to those who knew him, and each knew a slightly different side of him, he was friendly but basically shy, attractive, opinionated, courteous, kind, moody, modest, idealistic, reticent, and articulate - although never about himself. He had a fine sense of humour and of the ridiculous. All agreed that he was a strong man, even into old age. Without ever demanding it, he was given respect and loyalty.
He was uncomfortable with praise or adulation. Bob Nolan hoped the public would think well of his songs but he was truly indifferent to what they thought of him personally.
He was not at all interested in his past or in keeping records and admitted, "I don’t go back to the past too much. I sometimes go back to try to find out what happened at what time, but I don’t live in the past at all. It repulses me no end to have people come up to me and say, Hey! I knew you when... and take me back thirty or forty years. It’s very repulsive to me to start or even begin to live in the past." As a result, he was not overly-concerned with correct dates, times or names on documents and this created a challenge to Bob's grandson and I who were attempting to chart his life.
So the following pages are not an attempt to analyze the man or explain why he was who he was. Bob maintained his personal privacy to the end, even to this day. This is not a full biography but a simple list of the facts of his life as we discovered them, illustrated with as many photos as we could find. His friends and family were generous with their opinions while agreeing that they never really knew him. They all felt that there was something more behind that courteous, kindly facade that kept them from stating equivocally, "I knew Bob Nolan." Perhaps the answer is, after all, found only in the words of his songs. (Elizabeth Drake McDonald)
Bob seldom spoke of his mother to his friends and family. He said he remembered nothing at all about her yet he wrote this line into a song, I call for mother all in vain. I never even knew her name. Why, tell me why? Had he blocked out every memory of his mother? After all, he was 8 and-a-half years old when she took him to New Brunswick. He should have remembered her easily. Why did he refuse to speak of her in later years? His younger brother, Earle, searched for and eventually found her when he was sixteen. He kept in touch with her until she died. Bob did not.
Flora Elizabeth Hussey, was born in Belfast, Ireland, moving to Canada in 1889 with her father, Frederick Hussey; mother, Louisa Jenkins Hussey; and brothers, Frederick, Percival and Waldon Hussey. She was working in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as a stenographer when Harry Bayard Nobles arrived in town to find employment as a tailor. Harry had dark brown eyes, dark brown hair, a ruddy complexion and was 5 feet 5 3/4 inches in height. He was cheerful and kind, "a very stocky guy," remembers Roy Drachman, "well-built and, by gosh, he was strong as the devil!" Harry and Flora were married on January 1, 1906, and Bob (Clarence Robert Nobles) was born on April 13, 1908 in Winnipeg. (More details in Flora Elizabeth Nobles.)
In 1912, by now a family of four after Earle’s birth in 1911, they moved to Vancouver and remained there until 1915 when the marriage failed. The family returned to Winnipeg where Flora found employment as an operator for the Manitoba Government Telephones. Harry left the boys with her and spent some time with his own parents back in New Brunswick before crossing the border into the United States, leaving the name "Nobles" behind him permanently. As "Harry B. Nolan", he looked for action in the American Southwest and joined the US Army in 1917.
Harry and Flora Nobles
(Photos courtesy of Jean Nolan Krygelski)
Working conditions for women in Manitoba in the early 1900s were well defined. By law, a married woman with dependent children was not allowed to work away from home and children. To complicate matters, Winnipeg was experiencing labour problems and the Manitoba Government Telephone Company was involved. In the summer of 1916, Flora was forced to take the children to her husband's parents, Charles and Ella Jane Nobles, in Hatfield Point, New Brunswick. She intended to come back for them when she was better able to support them and when she said goodbye to them, she did not realize that she would never see her eldest son again.
View of Belleisle Bay from the Nobles' window.
Photo courtesy of David Folster
Harry was bitter and divorce was perceived as a shame to his whole family. It is hard to understand this attitude from a distance of nearly one hundred years, but that is the way it was then. The boys' grandparents tried to erase Flora's memory from their lives. For the three years the boys lived with them, they were absolutely forbidden to speak their mother's name. Her letters never reached them. There was no attempt made by anyone to help the little boys understand the situation. Young Bob was convinced that his mother had abandoned him and the hurt remained with him for the rest of his life. He did find a measure of peace in the deep woods behind the house, a place he called his wildwood. Earle, a lively three years younger and more adaptable, became his grandmother's favorite but Bob held himself quietly and politely aloof from everyone.
Bob's "wildwood" on his grandparents' homestead in New Brunswick.
(Photo courtesy of Marsha Boyd Mitchell)
Bob or Clarence, now 8 years old, started school the Fall of 1916 at the Hatfield Point School. His teacher was Clara M. Tingley and the list of his classmates contained one of his young aunts, Mabel Spragg, and some of his cousins. Miss Tingley taught all the grades and her pupils ranged in age from 6 to 17 years of age. Bob and Earle attended school sporadically for Bob was needed to help with the chores on the farm and, after all, school was low on his grandfather's priority list. Bob's attendance was significantly lower than that of the rest of his class. In his early years with the Sons of the Pioneers, Bob was chosen to copy all the lyrics for the trio to use during rehearsals and broadcasts. Possibly due to his lack of early schooling, his spelling ability wasn't what it should have been and Bob wryly told his friend, Bill Bowen, "In the middle of a song, Timmy would startle us by breaking into laughter at the way I had misspelled some word." His spelling never did improve and this failure always annoyed and embarrassed him.
In later years, he often spoke of the beauty of the forest country in New Brunswick but he also admitted that, during those years, "We probably had one month out of the year that we went to school and it was five and one-half miles and I trotted the whole distance, half of the time with a Canadian lynx stalking me all the way." Forty years later Bob told a friend, "Oh, what a beautiful country. I don't think there's a more beautiful country in the whole of God's creation than that."
The little boys did make friends with the neighbour children, the Boyds, but there was no opportunity to get close to the other children in that rural community. Their grandfather kept them too busy. Their entertainment was simple – their young aunts liked to gather around the piano and sing together. They did have a gramophone but there was no radio in that home yet.
Although Bob claimed to have good memories of the time he spent on the old homestead, he never did go back to see his grandparents. His grandfather died in 1935, just when Bob’s career was on the rise. His grandmother lived eight years longer. She always looked for him to return but he never came.
Photo courtesy of David Folster
(Matilda Urquhart, whose name is on the headstone, was Charles and Ella Jane's youngest daughter.)
In the Summer of 1919, when Harry heard that Flora was preparing to return to New Brunswick to reclaim her boys, he wrote an urgent letter to his sister, Fannie, asking her to take them home to Boston with her until he was well enough to send for them. So Fannie appeared at the old homestead without warning one afternoon and left with the boys early the next morning. Little Earle cried; Bob said nothing. Their surname was changed to their father's adopted name of "Nolan" and their mother was never able to find them.
While the boys lived in Boston with their aunt, Bob attended school for the two years until, in 1921, Harry finally sent for him. He began school in Tucson as Clarence Robert Nolan, an impressionable thirteen-year-old torn from thick, green woodland country and replanted in the Sonora Desert. It was a shock and also the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the desert. He never tired of talking about the desert, or high prairie, and his love for it moved right into his songs. In later years, he recognized it as his true unchanging love, his mistress. Humans disappointed, yes; but his desert, never.
Earle joined Bob and his father three years later. Harry had remarried and his job as a tailor allowed him to rent only small houses or apartments. Life was a constant struggle with debt and there never seemed to be enough food for the growing boys.
Bob's brother, Earl, and half brother, Michael Foster Nolan, recall stories
Harry told them of his adventures - living in Alaska, Vancouver, and Regina,
going on an expedition to the North Pole, being a member of the expeditionary
force into Mexico after Pancho Villa, and being gassed at Belleau Wood, France.
Although the dates and the documents we have do not always support the legends,
they made Harry forever a hero in the minds and hearts of his children and
grandchildren. He died in Santa Monica, California, on November 13, 1948.
1921 saw Bob starting school in the seventh grade at Safford Junior High School, transferring to Roskruge Junior High the following spring. An outstanding athlete, he progressed normally through the grades, graduating from Tucson High School on May 25, 1928. During the summer holidays he worked as a lifeguard at the Wetmore Pool. Wetmore was more than an Olympic-size pool. It featured outdoor movies, a roller rink, a picnic park and a dance hall with a spring-suspended double maple floor so it was a gathering place for young people. During this time he started riding the rails, looking for work and seeing the country. He summed up his feelings in the line of a song when he wrote, When I feel the urge I gotta travel anywhere the tumbleweed blows.... Bob devoured the books of Richard Halliburton - tales of travel and true adventure like "The Royal Road to Romance", and these books fed that urge. He had a romantic heart in all senses of the word romance – love of adventure and the idealistic pursuit of that elusive, perfect love.
High School. (The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
For some reason, Bob let friends and interviewers believe that he had attended the University of Arizona for a time and studied harmony structure, etc. The University has no record of it although a careful search was made. His brother Earle confirmed this, "Bob was not too interested in continuing his studies." He was, however, a member of the Arion Club in Tucson High and his name is listed with the glee club in the 1928 school yearbook, The Tucsonian. His interest in harmony structure and love of harmony singing may have had its roots there.
The Tucsonian, 1928.
(The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
One of the secrets of the success of the Sons of the Pioneers was their precise breathing, timing, tone control and well-matched vocal coordination. This does not happen naturally; it is a learned and practiced skill. To someone listening closely to Bob’s solos in the Standard Radio transcriptions of 1934, it is obvious from his articulation and timing that he had been given expert training somewhere along the way. The musical instructor of the Arion Club may have been that expert. It has been suggested that the musical director of Columbia Pictures, Morris Stoloff, was the one responsible for the training but the Sons of the Pioneers’ harmonies were tight and true a full year before their first Columbia film.
According to his brother Earle,
Bob was always fooling around with something. He played the ukulele in grammar school and then the guitar. And he wrote a lot of poetry. Cool Water was first written as a poem when Bob was attending Tucson High School. Later when he helped form the Sons of the Pioneers singing group, he added music.
During the summer he rode the freights doing all kinds of odd jobs on ranches and in small towns. I remember one of his early songs was Riding Free on the Old SP humming a Western Tune. That title sort of sums up Bob’s life back in those days.
When I was growing up and going to school, Bob was singing and playing the guitar in Los Angeles vaudeville shows. He doubled in a gymnastic act. During the summer he was a lifeguard at Long Beach. I think Bob first became serious about singing when he was in school here [Tucson], though. He worked at the Circle J Ranch down near Patagonia. At night, he’d put on a dudish outfit, get out his guitar and sing his songs to the ranch guests.
I wasn’t surprised when I heard about [Bob’s first job on radio]. But I was when the group started to appear in movies. I saw the first one down at the State. It seemed funny to see Bob on the screen. Since then I see their movies every time they come to town.
I visited him in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. Felt like a country boy when he took me out to the movie set. Couldn’t take the late hours, either!
Bob told William Bowen, editor and publisher of The Pioneer News (a North Hollywood Sons of the Pioneers fan club magazine) that he wrote a poetry column for the Arizona Wildcat called Tumbleweed Trails. A search through the back issues of the Wildcat from 1927-1930 found no evidence of such a column. However, he may have been thinking of the Tucson High School newspaper, The Cactus Chronicles. He was definitely a member of the staff of The Tucsonian, the high school yearbook.
(The Calin Coburn
Collections ©2004)
Bill Bowen said that Bob seldom mentioned the fact that he was a Tucson High star athlete. On the Badger track team in 1927, he finished second in the Arizona state track meet with a vault of 11 feet 7 inches. Like his young brother a few years later, Bob could have entered the University of Arizona on an athletic scholarship but he was involved as a passenger in a motorcycle accident that partially severed his Achilles tendon. He then turned to weight-lifting and swimming.
Throughout high school, a very pretty co-ed figured largely in his life and they spent a lot of time together. To support a family meant a steady job and work was already scarce. He hitched free rides on freight trains back and forth across the country, not only looking for adventure but looking for work. At this time, he was not yet thinking of a career in music - just any job to keep food on the table.
Clarence Nolan and Pearl Fields
(The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
On July 7 1928, less than two months after he graduated from Grade 12, Bob married his high school sweetheart, sixteen-year old Tucsonian, Pearl Fields. Bob was barely 20. A daughter, Roberta Irene, was born to them thirteen months later but the marriage foundered almost from the beginning. Bitter letters from Pearl to her friends in Tucson portray a young husband who would not settle down to a traditional job as his wife thought he should. A fledgling musician could not support a family and Bob was in California, thinking seriously now of making music his career. Pearl was living with her parents in Texas and already considering divorce.
There was a brief reconciliation in Los Angeles in 1930 but the marriage failed completely in those grim early-Depression days. Pearl left him for good and refused to let him see their daughter for nearly 15 years. Some of his songs betray the heartsick loneliness of a father kept out of his child's life. Bob said he wrote The Touch of God's Hand at this time, too.
Bob and his first wife, Pearl.
Left: Clarence and Pearl
Right: Pearl with little Roberta
(The Calin Coburn
Collections ©2004)
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The story of the Sons of the Pioneers was told in full by Ken Griffis in his original book, "Hear My Song - the Story of the Celebrated Sons of the Pioneers" (1974, 1994). We strongly urge you to read the book. It is our opinion that, without Mr. Griffis' extensive interviews with each member, the original Sons of the Pioneers themselves would be faceless names today. Every history or biographical sketch you read about them has been influenced by these interviews. We owe him a large debt of gratitude. The following outline of Bob's career leans heavily on "Hear My Song", and is a thumbnail sketch of Bob's years with the Sons of the Pioneers told from his perspective. We have used Bob's words and photos as much as possible. For posters or publicity and production photos from each film, please go to Filmography or The Jan Scott Collection.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
CALIFORNIA LIFEGUARD AND CHAUTAUQUA
Although Bob wrote poetry and loved to sing, he never dreamed he would make his mark in the entertainment field. It did not occur to him that he would create an art form that was pure American; western, not cowboy music. He had no idea his songs would become known internationally and would live on for eighty years and more. All young singers dream of being stars but it was a combination of talent, hard work and being in the right place at the right time that sent Bob Nolan to the top of his field. His place in the sun was an uncomfortable one but he enjoyed it for a while, and then endured it for seventeen long years. Seventeen years in the public eye. Seventeen years of the most extreme pressure. Seventeen exciting, noisy, people-filled, spot-lit years in the life of a quiet man who craved solitude but instead had to battle mike fright daily. For seventeen years his name was everywhere, and then he disappeared. The only way to understand how the weight of these years bore him down is to list what he did. Then you may understand why he vanished from sight for almost thirty years. Unfortunately, it is only a partial list....
Looking for work in 1928-9, Bob traveled to California, tried a musical career
with a Chautauqua traveling group, washed a lot of dishes in restaurants and
finally found steady employment as a Los Angeles County Lifeguard on the beach
at Venice, California. He said he held that job for two years and then it, too,
disappeared in the Great Depression.
Bob as lifeguard with friend, Flash Whiting.
(The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
On Wednesday, September 30, 1931, Bob checked the classified section in The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and found a two-line want ad, "Yodeler for old-time act, to travel. Tenor preferred. 1727 E. 65 St." At the time he was a lodger at 433 Grand Ave in Los Angeles and working as a restaurant cook but, because he had worked barefoot on the beach for so long, he had no presentable shoes in which to appear for a job interview. He bought a new pair. The long walk after he reached the end of the streetcar line blistered his heels and he had to remove the new shoes. That's how Leonard Slye (Roy Rogers) remembered meeting him - golden tan, splendid physique, bare feet and blisters. But Bob could also sing any part and yodel, too, so he was hired on the spot.
Len was the sole singer with an instrumental group called "The Rocky
Mountaineers" and knew he would feel more comfortable on stage with another
singer. It wasn't long before he hired another, Bill "Slumber" Nichols, a friend of
Nolan's. This trio lasted until August, 1932, when Bob found a steady caddying
job at the Bel Air Country Club. The trio was always hungry, had no steady wage
and made very little money aside from passing the hat, but Bob remembered those
early days, performing for civic functions, as much more fun than being in the
spotlight at Madison Square Garden ten years later.
(Left photo courtesy of Ed Phillips. Right is from the Calin Coburn Collections.)
William
"Slumber" Nichols (Ed Phillips photo)
Quotations from Slumber Nichols' diary (Hear My Song, 1974):
I joined the Rocky Mountaineers just one day before Thanksgiving, November, 1931. Bob Nolan, a friend of mine that I used to go swimming with on the beach behind the Venice Plunge and who taught me the art of handstanding, answered an ad for a yodeler and to be with above mentioned group. One day, I was home in Venice, and I had been out of a job for some time and was in debt up to my neck and just had given up, so to speak, when Bob called. He wanted me to meet him and the gang the next day at Crenshaw and Washington Blvds. in Los Angeles, where they would pick me up and take me to their house for a tryout.
Out of all the many jobs I had worked at, I had given each a fair chance to interest me as a trade but I had never run across the right thing, always wanting to be something different, someone to whom the majority of people would look up. I knew that was every man's desire and I had made up my mind to be just that if I could possibly make it. Hence all the thrill to have a chance to be an actor, radio artist or what have you.
I did find that after I had been with the gang for a while I had found my niche in life and was going to stick with it, even if I starved to death trying.
I had an awful hard time cramming songs into my head because I was brought up on classical music, and hillbilly music was about as far out as you can get from a classical background. When I went to play the new music, I just couldn't think of how it went. Hence, many embarrassing moments for yours truly. Gee, how I had to fight mike and stage fright. All I could think of was all the people I was playing for - who were hearing and watching me. With overcoming that came pride and confidence. Boy, how I liked to strut around in my Mountaineer outfit, blue cord pants, boots, checkered shirt, neckerchief and soldier's hat.
I went through the stage of thinking everyone knew who I was and that everyone worshipped and envied me. Then gradually came the changes that made everything different. You overcame those ideas of grandeur. You played before audiences on radio and it all summed up to one thing - work! It's just like any other job, not so hard and dirty as some, but still it is work. You even become a clock-watcher because your whole job depends upon so many minutes before you are on the air or stage, and so many minutes before you are off.
One night we were coming home form KGER (Daddy Ranger Frolics) and we were very low in spirits and lower in finances. We had been playing lots of dates but got nothing for it due to our manager's poor management. We were halfway home, when out of the blue sky came the words, "Well, Bill, we will have to let you go because there are too many men in the act." God, what a sensation! What a shattering of dream castles falling all around me. My one big thing in life died as suddenly as it had been born.
A few days later I went over to see the boys broadcast with my mouth open. I'll never be able to tell in words the picture that flashed through my mind. The new life that I had begun to enjoy and love, all going down the drain and no way to plug that drain. The world and I were two separate entities while I saw the transformation of myself from the pedestal back down into the rut I had fought so hard to get out of. I went home from there, had no recollection of getting home, sat in a chair and when I next knew anything, it was daylight. In short, I was shaken out of my conscious mind; I had taken it so hard.
When Ebb fired me, Bob and Len lost all interest because it just set them back to where they were before I came into the gang. All that twelve to fourteen hours a day practice for six weeks gone to hell. It took all the heart out of them and they quit trying.
I had been home just one week when I got a phone call asking me to come over and help them play at the Frolics. I found the gang had brought me back over Ebb's head. He never said a thing.
The Rocky
Mountaineers were an established radio group under contract to Winona M. Tenny.
When Bob and I joined, Ebb was tied up with her some way and this is where
George Gammon came into the act as our new manager and signed us up in a new
contract.
June 20, 1932 Copied down Bob's 'Way Out There' and
'Rainbow's End' today so he could get them copyrighted. Had been so long since I
wrote music that I was proud of myself for still being able to do it.
July 19, 1932. "Hot Dog! We got a sponsor for sixty days at
the pay of $50.00 a week (whole gang, not each), over KFAC and with our pay of
$30.00 a week over KGER, that makes a total of $80.00 a week for all of us. Our
sponsor on KGER is a fellow named Edwards who is selling Coos Bay land.
August 1, 1932. Ernie gave George a 30 day notice to quit the
gang. I don't know just what we will do for a car for transportation, nor me for
a place to stay if we bust up.
August 3, 1932. George said Nolan moved out last night and he
didn't show up for the program, so Len and I threw together a program for that
day and put it on. Came home and tried to figure out how we could make out for a
trio yodel at the theatre. Bob called up and said he would see us at the show.
We had a full house. Len and I feel like we would just rather quit than to break
in a new man to the over 200 trios we already have. We did so good after nine
months of intense rehearsal.
The small but regular paycheck plus tips from the Country Club was very welcome after going hungry with the Rocky Mountaineers. Bob's job as a caddy allowed him time to compose and he said that there was hardly a day went by that he wasn't working on a song. He often wrote songs with intricate rhythm patterns and triple rhymes, songs immediately recognizable as what would later be termed Nolanesque. Right from the beginning of his career, he wanted to write songs that were different. One of those differences was his use of the masculine reference to all the elements of nature - the wind, the sun, etc. Another was a sprinkling of formal English reminiscent of his favourite poets - Keats, Byron and Poe. His melodies often progressed up and down the chromatic scale, something new in popular music.
It was at this time that Bob wrote his most famous song, Tumbling Tumbleweeds. It began as a poem about the leaves he saw being torn and whirled from the trees during a storm he was watching from his apartment window. But it was himself he saw, not the leaves, being tossed around at the whim of the Depression. No wife, no daughter, no career, no future. He wrote it all into the little poem he called Tumbling Leaves and, like all his best poetry, it reflected his own philosophy of life. It was a philosophy from which he never veered.
Days may be dreary, still I’m not weary.
My heart needs no consoling.
At each break of dawn you’ll find that I’ve gone
Like old tumbling leaves, I’m rolling.
See them tumbling down,
Pledging their love to the ground,
Lonely but free I’ll be found
Drifting along with the tumbling leaves.
Cares of the past are behind,
Nowhere to go but I’ll find
Just where the trail will wind,
Drifting along with the tumbling leaves.
I know when night has gone
That a new world’s born at dawn.
I’ll keep rolling along,
Deep in my heart is a song
Here on the range I belong,
Drifting along with the tumbling leaves.
(2nd verse)
Time keeps rolling along,
Why should I care if I'm wrong,
Here in my heart is a song,
Drifting along with the tumbling leaves.
When Bob left the Rocky Mountaineers, Tim Spencer was hired to replace him in the trio. The new trio, minus Bob Nolan, joined Benny Nawahi's International Cowboys for a time and then formed the O Bar O Cowboys in 1933, toured the Southwest and almost starved en route.
Left to right: Cyclone, Len Slye, Uncle Joe, Vern Spencer and Slumber
Nichols.
(The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
When they returned, Tim found a job in a Safeway warehouse and gave up the idea of making his living in music. Roy, working now with Jack and His Texas Outlaws, was still convinced they could do it if they could only persuade Bob Nolan to join them in a trio again. He talked Tim into trying once more and they both went out to visit Bob on the golf course. But Bob, eating regularly and not too receptive to the idea at all, was hard to persuade. It took all of Roy's enthusiasm and Tim's ingenuity to change his mind. With misgivings, Bob gave up his steady job - and the tips.
The three men found room and board together and began practicing.
They were determined to be better than their competition and they aimed for the
most popular radio station in the vicinity – KFWB, a Warner Brothers station.
Velma Spencer, Tim's wife, recalled that they treated their preparations like
any job – they got up early, went to work and practiced for eight hours every
day.
They called themselves The Pioneer Trio and put themselves through this
grueling routine daily, singing until their voices gave out. At the same
time, they were performing free of charge with The Texas Outlaws on KFWB for
about six months because they were not yet on staff.
Bob could play the ukulele and perhaps, at that time, a few chords on the guitar but that was all. He could not read music. None of them could. He did become proficient on the bull fiddle but he was always an indifferent guitar player. He used his guitar to find the chords he wanted for his melodies - as a tool more than as a musical instrument.
Jack
LeFevre and His Texas Outlaws
Left to right: Rudy
Sooter, Curley Hogg, Tim Spencer, Bob Nolan, Len Slye, Half Pint and Jack.
(The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
The trio practiced endlessly until they considered themselves ready for a KFWB interview. A little more than talent and practice was involved, however. Here is how Bob described it:
Tim broke all the rules, as I was accustomed to doing, too, musically and ethically. He wasn’t averse to buying our way into a situation, which was exactly what we did.
We took cognizance of all the radio stations in and around this vicinity, the Los Angeles vicinity, and we found KFWB was partial to harmony singers and so we aimed at them specifically. When we decided to do this, our boarding house was right close to that studio and we ate lunch at the same place that KFWB’s staff was eating and we became acquainted with who was who at KFWB, and we talked to certain people.
Harry Hall was the head engineer who did all the mixing over there. Tim approached him. We invited him up to our boarding house for lunch and then we took him up into our dormitory where we stayed, and gave him an audition. He said, "I think my boss would like you guys," and Tim said, "That’s all we want!"
And it cost us $150, but it was a big help. We each put in a $50 bill. When Tim spread those $50 bills in front of him, Harry couldn’t resist. He said, "I’ll get you an audition!"
We had our program all mapped out so that it was all letter perfect and geared to get the interest of whoever was listening, and then hit them with outlandish stuff that they’d never heard before. It was all original music which Tim or I had written.
And you know what? We got into our second song— Way Out There. We were looking up into the mixer’s room where the station manager was standing, listening to us, and in the middle of that song he turned his back and walked out. All three of our hearts went right to the floor. We thought he didn’t like us. So Harry Hall switched on the intercom down in the studio where we were and he said, "That’s all, boys," and then turned it off.
Then, about at the count of 6, he turns it back on and says, "You’re hired!" It was just like a bomb! And that was it. That’s the beginning of the whole thing. The guy didn’t even wait to hear the end of the song.
While we were working up to our audition there, they'd put us with Jack and his Texas Outlaws who were there on gratis, just as a fill-in in the daytime around about noontime and nobody’d be listening. Now we were staff musicians and KFWB gave us a very exclusive spot - a fifteen minute spot - 7:30 in the evening when everybody’s home just after dinner which has always been called Prime Time. They kept trying to find a name for us. One of the announcers on that station at that time said, "You’re awfully young to be pioneers, why don’t you call yourself The Sons of the Pioneers?" And that was the beginning of The Sons of the Pioneers, just the three men.
And the workload---we began to get popular by means of the media and then those days the radio was everything and the stars were there. The columnist, Bernie Milligan of the Los Angeles Examiner, wrote a column - three columns long, full pages, the full length of the page. And, if you got in that column, you made it. We made it! And in fact, he wrote regular and he had us in the doggone thing three times a week and naturally, we could get sponsors. We were just rolling with sponsors.
And, of course, the money – the pay started going up, too, and we were making, I think, $40 a week apiece. Rich, man! I bought a new car every year! Why, the three of us lived at the same boarding house and we got two meals a day there, two home-cooked meals a day and our room for $7 a week. That left an awful lot of money to play around with.
According to Les Adams, the first printed appearance of the "Sons of the Pioneers" name was in a newspaper radio log The dated March 3, 1934. With a steady paycheck coming in, Bob began to send regular installments of money to Pearl for support of their daughter. Now that he was in better circumstances, he asked for custody of little Roberta. Pearl not only refused, she would not let him see his child at all, even though she herself had remarried.
Early in 1934, the trio started looking for instrumental back-up to ease the tremendous load they put on their voices because they were on air at least twenty times a week. They were singing constantly and needed someone to share that load with a solo instrumental, when necessary. From 8-9am they were on radio as The Pioneer Trio, from 5-6pm as The Gold Star Rangers, and in the late evening they joined the Jack Joy Orchestra "painting the old west in song". They also had a program every Sunday at noon. The trio looked carefully around the vicinity for an instrumentalist and zeroed in on Hugh Farr. Bob said that Hugh was not eager to leave his current group until he heard the three men sing. Bob explains how the group came to choose the Farr Brothers:
And Hugh, we hadn’t heard him play old time music, see, until one night we was listening to this---they called them the School Kids or something like that [Buttercream School Kids, a sitcom on KFOX] and they took the part of young kids, you know, the talking part and then they played their instruments, too. And Hugh one night played one of those breakdown things that you’ve heard him play and, I’m telling you, we just went out of our gourds! We had to have that fiddler. We’d been hearing him play Lady Be Good and stuff like that---the modern music of the day, and when he hit that Sally ... Fire in the Mountain ...Sally’s Got a Little One and it was one of the wildest things we ever heard, that old time fiddling stuff.
(Karl E. Farr Collection)
Farley's Gold Star Rangers and Gus Mack
(The Calin Coburn
Collections ©2004)
[Sam Allen] spent some time with Herb Angell, the Sheriff at KQV in Pittsburgh. Herb has been spinning Sons of the Pioneers' transcriptions on that station one-half hour daily for six days a week and six straight years for one account. It's the Palace Clothiers – they've given away more than one and on-half million photos. (Bob Nolan, p. 6 Tumbleweed Topics, January 1942)
Bob:
So, Hugh came first. Karl wasn’t sold. Hugh came up first and we hired him and I think that Karl held out for about a month and Hugh finally talked him into it. He said, "These boys are going up!" Going up! They were making darn near as much as we were - $40 a week on that program they had down in Long Beach. And now there’s five of us and that’s the way we stood until 1937 when Roy got his big break and came to Republic.
Left to right: Karl Farr, Hugh Farr, Tim Spencer, Leonard Slye and Bob Nolan.
In front, clapping the rhythm is Gus Mack, MC for The Gold Star Rangers on KFWB.
(Karl E. Farr Collection)
Karl E. Farr Collection
Tim married Velma Blanton on August 10, 1934, at the Wee Kirk of the Heather at Forest Lawn, California. Velma was the Texas girl Tim met on his trip through the Southwest with the O Bar O Cowboys. Bob sang, "I Love You Truly" and Hugh Farr played his fiddle at the ceremony. The young couple set up housekeeping just a few blocks from where the trio had lived in the beginning.
Tumbling Tumbleweeds was not yet the signature song of the Sons of the Pioneers. In their early programs, the group used There's a Blue Sky Away Up Yonder as their theme, a tune that Rex Allen would use later. Radio audiences not only listened from their radio sets at home but would often go right down to the studio to take in the live broadcast and stage show. Home listeners could also phone in or write in requests and Tumbling Leaves was a popular request right from the start. Because sound was not perfect, the title was often misheard as "Tumbling Weeds" and the audience, both at the studio and by telephone, would request the "tumbling weeds" song. Bob eventually gave in and changed the name, making slight adjustments to the words and melody. This is how he described the transition:
The song itself, the melody, had different lyrics altogether and it was quite by accident that we thought of Tumbling Tumbleweeds. I didn’t at the time. They kept requesting this Tumbling Weeds song and the song at the time was Tumbling Leaves. I’d say about 7 out of 10 requests for the song came in “Tumbling Weeds” so Harry Hall said, “Why don’t you change the lyrics and make it “Tumbling Weeds”? Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Just the same melody except that it didn’t have that tilted note in the latter part. It went da da da da da da da da da dum.
And once I used the “tumbleweed” at the end of the phrase, I had to put in that tilt – tu-dum – where it hits the snag. Da da da da da da da da da dum tu dum. Have you ever seen a tumbleweed go racing across the desert and hit a fence? It hits it with just that sound. If you close your eyes, that’s what you see. What you hear with that one note is what you see when you see a tumbleweed hit a fence. It goes tumbling along, “ta da da da da da bump ta da” till it gets on the other side.
Historian Douglas B. Green states unequivocally, "If western music has an anthem, this is it. Lonely but free I’ll be found, drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds defines in a dozen words and a gorgeous sweep of melody, the appeal of the myth of the cowboy and the west. No one who hears it for the first time can fail to be struck by its imagination, originality and poetry, even now.... As the singing cowboy phenomenon took shape, this song became the musical embodiment of what screenwriters were trying to capture and portray in the west: the sweep, the loneliness, the proud isolation."
In the beginning, their only real competition was from the Beverly Hill Billies, a group created in 1930 by Glen Rice, manager of radio station KMPC in Beverly Hills. Rice led his radio audience to believe that he had stumbled across a hillbilly family back in the hills of Beverly and that he had persuaded them to ride out on their mules to perform on his station. People believed the story and eagerly awaited every program. The Hill Billies easily became the most popular country group in Southern California and people would flock around the radio station to get a look at them. One time a crowd estimated at ten thousand blocked traffic on Wilshire Boulevard in front of the station. This is what Bob recalled to Ken Griffis about those days:
I remember going out to the station in hopes of seeing the fellows only to find such a crowd I couldn’t get within a block of the station. I remember one time when I went out there, I could see people coming from all over, carrying boxes to stand on just so they could see through the windows.
He also recalled approaching Lem Giles of the Beverly Hill Billies to see if the two groups could exchange a few of their unpublished songs to perform on their respective radio programs. The songs could not be used on the air without the consent of the composer and Lem turned Bob down each time he asked. Finally, Bob told him that if he didn’t cooperate he would take one of Lem's most popular songs, The Little Choir Boy Sings All Alone Tonight, change one note every four bars and take credit for it. And so the beautiful I Wonder if She Waits for Me Tonight was born.
As well as being hired to play for dances and parties, the Pioneers were asked to entertain at the rodeos. Often there was resentment between the rodeo and the radio cowboys and, although scraps were not uncommon, over the years many friendships were formed. One such association with Curley Fletcher, creator of The Strawberry Roan, resulted in a song. Bob wrote music for Curley Fletcher's poem, Desolation, and published the song in both their names.
Curley Fletcher at left. Right: Bob with a fellow who may be Curley Fletcher with two children on the rodeo grounds, 1934.
The original snapshot is very small and positive identification is impossible.
(The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
DECCA RECORD COMPANY AND THE STANDARD RADIO TRANSCRIPTIONS
In 1934, the Decca Record Company recorded the Sons of the Pioneers - Len, Bob, Tim and Hugh. On December 15, Tumbling Tumbleweeds hit the charts and shortly after that the group was signed by Standard Radio to make transcription discs. The first series of 102 songs were recorded and on March 7, 1935, the four men signed a one year contract with Decca. Royalties were 2 cents each on a double disc and 1 cent each on a single. Karl Farr was then hired and a second Standard Radio transcription series was made in 1935. Each man was paid a flat fee of $600 and, while the transcription series was immensely popular and profitable for the company, the Pioneers received nothing further. They did, however, become nationally-known through these transcriptions and the Decca recordings of 1935-37. The movie parts they were offered brought them even more publicity.
Photocopy of Decca contract courtesy of Fred Goodwin.
(John Fullerton Collection)
(The Calin Coburn
Collections ©2004)
In front of KFWB, left to right: Len, Karl, Hugh, Tim with his mother and Bob.
(The Calin Coburn
Collections ©2004)
(Karl E. Farr Collection)
(Karl E. Farr Collection)
1934 was the year Bob sold Tumbling Tumbleweeds, unaware that by doing so, he was losing what could have been the means to fulfill his enduring wish to travel. (See Laurence Zwisohn.) The rights and royalties did not return to him in his lifetime so his dream of travel was reduced to one sea voyage to Hawaii shortly after he retired.
Copy of original Tumbling Tumbleweeds sheet music published by Sunset Music Co., courtesy of Ron McFadden
(The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
Sam Fox 1934
1935 saw two of Bob's songs, Tumbling Tumbleweeds and Moonlight on the Prairie, used as movie titles and performed by two different singing cowboys - Gene Autry and Dick Foran. Tumbling Tumbleweeds was used as the title of Gene Autry's first feature-length starring film and was Republic Pictures' first step into a new genre. The Sons of the Pioneers did not appear in either of the films. These movies laid the groundwork for the Singing Cowboy Western, which remained popular for twenty years. It is interesting to think that Bob's signature song was involved at the very beginning of this phenomenon.
One of Autry’s first million-selling records was his own rendition of Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Its success prompted Gene to ask Bob more than once for another hit song along the same lines. “Sure, Gene,” Bob would always respond from his customary perch in the café he frequented. “I’m working on a new song just for you.” But Bob undoubtedly knew that Gene insisted on equal writer credits on all songs and that would not suit Bob at all.
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Tumbling Tumbleweeds has been recorded by countless artists, including Rex Allen Jr, M. Allison, Alshire Singers, Eddy Arnold, Gene Autry, Moe Bandy, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Chartsound Orchestra, R Clark, B Cole, Collins C Quartet, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Ken Curtis, Nelson Eddy, Dale Evans, Fireside Singers, Jan Garber, Gatlin Brothers, Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, Grant Green, Jim Hendricks, Sonya Hunter, Burl Ives, J King, L Kottke, Jim Kweskin, Sleepy La Beef, Longines Symphonette, Meat Puppets, Vaughn Monroe, Michael Martin Murphey, Willie Nelson, Michael Nesmith, Jimmy C Newman, Patti Page, Johnny Puleo, Riders in the Sky, Marty Robbins, Roy Rogers, Diana Ross and the Supremes, S Schuyler, Kate Smith, Hank Snow, Sons of the Pioneers, Jo Stafford, Suave Swing Orchestra, Billy Vaughn, Jimmy Wakely, Lawrence Welk, The Western-Ayres, Slim Whitman, Roger Williams, etc.
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THE FIRST MOVIES (for a complete list, see Filmography)
The Sons of the Pioneers began their own movie career with the Liberty picture, The Old Homestead in 1935 but the year before that, Bob's voice made its film debut in Mascot's In Old Santa Fe, starring Ken Maynard. Maynard was a handsome, reckless, popular western star and he liked to sing but the studio was unsure of how the public would accept his high, thin singing voice. So they recorded Bob singing That's Why I Like My Dog for Ken to mime in the first scene. This is the film that actually launched Gene Autry's career in the movies - and Bob was involved in it, too. In other words, Bob Nolan was right there in the thick of things at the beginning of the Singing Cowboy movie craze and his Tumbling Tumbleweeds was the name of the very first film of that genre. Bob appeared personally in at least 88 films.
The Pioneers wrote the songs and appeared with Charles Starrett in Columbia's Gallant Defender. They had no real acting parts, just song sequences around campfires and work as extras. They were singing on Dr. Cowan's (dentist) radio program early in the mornings and then going over to the Columbia lot by 6:00am to get ready for the day's shooting which began about 7:00am. Gallant Defender cost roughly $150,000 and took about three weeks to complete. Finding titles for all these B-Westerns was a challenge and the way Columbia handled it was to get all the office staff together - stenographers, secretaries, etc - and show the new film to them. They would all submit a name and whoever won would get the $15 prize.
The Sons of the Pioneers made several shorts in 1935 (See Various Films), appeared in the two B-Western feature films for Columbia, and Bob was seen and his songs were heard on screen by an audience that craved music. Sound in the movies was in its infancy and the people wanted music as well as action. These were heady days for the young men. They did not make much money and they had to work extremely hard but they became known across the nation.
Douglas B. Green explains the reason for their quick rise to fame: "Their songs were sweeping and majestic. They were about the west. They were about the wide-open spaces and the free life and fresh air; not so much about branding and taming wild horses. They took those old songs of the trail and the endless ballads in three chords and completely revitalized them with their musicianship and their songwriting and harmony. Nobody was singing three part harmony, yodeling in harmony, like that. It was unheard of when they started in the 30s."
Way Up Thar
(Karl E. Farr Collection)
If 1935 was busy, 1936 was hectic. The group continued their radio broadcasts on KFWB, made an appearance with Bing Crosby in Paramount's Rhythm on the Range, supported Dick Foran in two Warner Brothers films, performed for three weeks at the Texas Centennial in Dallas, appeared in two Gene Autry Republic films and another Charles Starrett picture for Columbia, and all that time they were constantly expanding their repertoire. Because they were on staff at KFWB, they might have two or three programs a day and they needed new songs constantly. They also appeared on KFOX in Long Beach, KRLD in Los Angeles and as The Gold Star Rangers on both KFWB and KMTR in Hollywood. They depended heavily on old-time songs but Bob and Tim were continually writing new ones, too. This is how Bob described it:
We wasn’t going to do anything that anybody else did at all. We had to do a lot of "Gay 90’s" stuff like Annie Rooney because there was an insatiable demand at that time for harmony singing. And we were on radio at least an hour a day, every day of the year, and sometimes two hours. We had to have an awful lot of material, and that’s where we beat everybody else to the top spot because we had a repertoire at the time (after we had taken the job at KFWB) of at least three thousand songs, all committed to memory, both words and harmony. No other group in town could match us. I would take the lower register and Roy would take the lead, and Tim would take the top. Sometimes we were infringing on each other; like the tenor would be the high baritone and I would come up into the low tenor. We just felt the thing as we went along. It was a wonderful group to work with when it was young, when we were all working on it real hard.
At the invitation of Texas Governor James V Allred, the Pioneers made their first public appearance outside of California during a three-week engagement at the Texas Exposition. Dale Evans remembers seeing them there, "I was walking through the Centennial there at Dallas and here was this huge exhibit by Gulf Oil and a bunch of boys standing behind a glass performing, just almost non-stop."
(Karl E. Farr Collection)
(Courtesy of John Fullerton)
Part of the film they were currently appearing in with Gene Autry, The Big Show, was filmed on site. At the same exposition, they had their first taste of rubbing shoulders with the federal government when they had their photograph taken with Vice President Garner. They also recorded two sides for Decca while they were in Dallas.
Newspaper clipping from the Hollywood Citizen-News, 1936
Left to right: Bob Nolan, Hugh Farr, Tim Spencer, “’CACTUS JACK’ AND COWBOY CROONERS – Vice-President Garner flatly refused to pose for ‘gag’ pictures at the Texas Centennial Exposition. Rangerettes, fishing in the world’s fair lagoon, and a dozen other stunts were spurned but – well, cowboys are different and so he put on his ten-gallon hat for the photographer.”
(The Calin Coburn Collections ©2004)
Shortly after the Sons of the Pioneers returned from the Texas Centennial, Tim Spencer left the group and did not return until early in 1939. Wesley Tuttle and Charlie Quirk took his place for a few weeks and then nineteen-year-old Lloyd Perryman, with his beautiful lyrical voice, was hired in his place. They were still singing on radio both as The Sons of the Pioneers and Farley's Gold Star Rangers.
The sound of the trio had been built around Nolan’s distinctive vibrato, laughingly referred to by Tim as ‘our bubbling baritone.’ They experimented with each man moving from position to position in front of the mike. After Perryman joined, the trio harmony became more exacting, and Nolan noticed that when he was in the middle, he found Spencer and Perryman listening to his voice and he could more easily hear theirs. Bob remembered their smiles as they acknowledged their approval of the new arrangement. Tim said that Nolan’s voice appeared to overlap and lock in all three voices.