Girls of the Golden West

The Girls of the Golden West were an American singing duo. Always dressed in fancy and colorful outfits in the Western style, they used her image as a singing cowgirl. Accordingly, their repertoire consisted mostly of traditional and self-composed cowboy songs, but partly also from songs from the field of country music.

Life

Originally came the Sisters of Mount Carmel, Illinois, but grew up in Mount Vernon, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri, on. There they had their first appearances in the local radio station KNOX. Since they did not like that her real surname " Goad " on the radio either as " Goat " or " Gold" sounded, they changed him unceremoniously into "Good". Finally, on the proposal of a transmitter employees they took her stage name pays homage to the English title of the 1910 opera La Fanciulla del West premiered (English: " The Girl of the Golden West " ) by Giacomo Puccini and is itself based on a short story by Bret Harte and the play by David Belasco is based.

After a brief interlude in the "border station" XER they changed in 1933 finally to the transmitter WLS in Chicago, where they quickly became popular members of the National Barn Dance. In WLS Family Album, for advertising purposes issued a yearbook, they were referred to as real cowgirls from a Texas town called " Muleshoe "; a legend that they maintained even later, because they found the idea and especially the name particularly amusing.

Career

In WLS, the two sisters met Gene Autry, with whom she also went on tour. Autry's friend and longtime " sidekick " Smiley Burnette encouraged them to try on their own compositions and helped them with their first own song Two Cowgirls on the Lone Prairie. During this time she also developed her distinctive style of dress, mostly they tomized their richly ornamented with fringes and applications blouses and skirts even itself together with movie cowboys like Autry and Roy Rogers they coined as the typical Western - style of this era ( in stark contradiction to the clothing of the real cowboys status), which should rub off on numerous country artists later.

In 1937, she left and went to WLS WLW in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they appeared in shows such as Renfro Valley Barn Dance, Boone County Jamboree and the Midwestern Hayride. After the audience's enthusiasm for the Singing Cowboys end of the 1940s, however, gradually began to dry up, so does the career of the girls tended to their end; In 1949 they had their last live appearance. In 1963 she made ​​some recordings again for the Texas Bluebonnet label.

In addition to her appearances on the radio and concert tours, they also made ​​numerous LP recordings, for the first time in July 1933 for Bluebird Records, and later for ARC (until 1938 ). While they recorded initially mainly traditional cowboy songs alongside ballads from the American Southwest, the weight shifted increasingly towards own compositions as Silvery Moon on the Golden Gate, which was to become her trademark. 1938 was the cowboy - share is still about half of their shots.

Your vocal style, they remained always faithful: two -part harmony singing, accompanied on the guitar and enriched with virtuoso yodeling executed. Thus they resembled stylistically partially rather the brother duo this time, such as the Delmore Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys. Because of their appearance and their choice of songs they but rather the Western Group were attributed.

In that time still dominated by men music business, the girls became a model and trailblazer for female artists, especially for the duo as the Davis Sisters.