Patsy Montana

Patsy Montana was born Ruby Blevins near Hot Springs, Arkansas on October 30, 1908. By the time she was a teenager, Ruby had learned to play the guitar and fiddle (violin). In her late teens, Ruby added an “e” onto the end of her name and headed for Hollywood, where after studying at the University of California at Los Angeles, she got a job playing music on the radio as “Rubye Blevins, the Yodeling Cowgirl from San Antone.” It made no difference to Rubye or her producers that the young singer had never lived in Texas. Still, there was some truth to the moniker, for Rubye was an accomplished yodeler. Yodeling originated in Switzerland, where shepherds and cow herders used the sound to draw livestock to the corral. One explanation argues that the origins of yodeling in western music can be traced not to singing cowboys on long cattle drives, but to Jimmie Rodgers, a Mississippi blues musician considered by many to be the father of country music, who, after hearing a traveling group of Swiss yodelers, adapted their sounds to his own brand of music. Later musicians like Bill Monroe, Roy Rogers, and Montana developed the craft to a new level.

In the 1930s, after joining two other female singers in a group known as the “Montana Cowgirls” on another California radio show, Rubye changed her name to Patsy Montana, and began developing her image as a western singer. Cowboy, or cowgirl, hats and boots, embroidered shirts, and scarves added to an image that was bolstered by songs about the West and a surname borrowed from a western state. In 1933 Patsy joined the Kentucky Ramblers for a regular gig on Chicago’s nationally broadcasted Barn Dance radio program featuring country and western music. Because of Patsy’s new western image and the popularity of cowboy songs at the time, the group changed its name from the Kentucky Ramblers to the Prairie Ramblers. In 1934 Patsy wrote, then in the next year, recorded the song that showcased her talents as a writer and as a masterful yodeler. “I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart” became the first song by a female recording artist to sell one million records.

Patsy continued to record and perform into the 1990s. She passed away at her home in California in 1996. Later that same year she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

1. Yodeling stretches our ideas about the capabilities of the human voice. Listen to Patsy Montana’s yodeling at the beginning of “I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart.” See if you can write out the sequence of sounds she strings together in this yodel (yee-o-di-kay, etc.). Together, as a class, form a chorus to perform Montana’s yodel, with each singer responsible for a short piece of it.

2. Patsy Montana, Roy Rogers, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and other classic western artists changed their birth names. Look in your newspaper for names of entertainers, then research those people to see if the names we know them by are the original names given them by their parents. Why do you think so many entertainers change their name? What would you use as a stage name? Why?

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