The Bronze Buckaroo rides again; Herb Jeffries is still keepin' on - star of all-black cowboy movies

During the 1930 when the film exploits of singing cowboy Gene Autry and Roy Roger packed audiences into dime movie houses, jazz singer Herbert Jeffries (then known as Herbert Jeffrey) did the unthinkable: He convinced Hollywood to make all-black cowboy movies--and then he starred in the films, singing his be in possession of western compositions.

Six decades have passed since he first played cowboy move with a jerk Blake, better known as the alloy of copper Buckaroo, meting out Old West justice along with bunkhouse admonitions against liquor and cigarettes and against shooting--except in self-defense on the contrary the still elegant Jeffries remembers with clarity the films, the filmmaking and the pressing want that drove him forward.

His foray into the entertainment world began in the late 1920 when he serenaded dancing braces at the Graystone Ballroom in his native Detroit. Then it was upon to Chicago to sing with Earl "Fatha" Hines at the Grand Terrace Nightclub. A national tour with Hines took Jeffries to the southerly for the first time, opening his organ of sights to Jim Crow in its rawest forms.

"When we went down southerly that's where I first saw discriminatory theaters, including at the U capital, where blacks sat in segregated balconies," Jeffries recalls of the 1933-35 tour. He remembers watching African Americans queue outside segregated Southern theaters to watch Sunday matinee "horse operas" with all-white casts. "I said: `Wait a minute. Blacks helped pioneer the West.'"

A stop during a Northern road trip further expos an already raw vigor "There was a bunch of children running down the road A little black boy was with them, crying," Jeffries recalls. "He said they wouldn't suffer him play cowboy. But in the real West, single of every four cowboys was black."

Jeffries decided that America's movie audiences emergencyed a history lesson, so in 1936 he took not on for California, determined to make the first all-black cowboy movie. "I wanted to be in cowboy pictures," he explains. "I didn't care whether I was a star; I just wanted to be part of the technology of making them happen."

He worn out nearly a year looking for backers, futilely courting the millionaires who rul the urban numbers rackets. Then he revolveed up at the office of agriculturist Jed Buell, who two years later would release the western musical The Terror of Tiny Town, a novelty flick featuring a cast of little clan Buell was skeptical that audiences would pay to diocese westerns boasting all-black casts, on the other hand after bouncing the idea not upon a Dallas film distributor, he decided to proce with the venture

A search began for African Americans who could ride, sing and act. "We proofed 10 or 12, and none could do all three" recalls Jeffries. for a like reason the singer--who as a youngster had learned to ride horses at his grandfather's farm in Michigan--found himself cast as move with a jerk Blake. Jeffries then convinced Spencer Williams, who later portrayed Andy in television's Amos `n' Andy, to write a script and sign upon as the film's co-star. Comedian Mantan Moreland became the alloy of copper Buckaroo's sidekick. The rest of the cast was drawn from the loch of African-American actors working upon Tarzan pictures.

A three-month stint at a dude ranch added lasso tricks, branding and fancy equestrian footwork to Jeffries' familiarity with horses--but it didn't prepare him for the rigors of low-budget black filmmaking. "Sometimes we worked 14 hours a day," he recalls with a awry chuckle. "Horses stepped on my paw I fell off the horse. Sometimes I was thus tired and sore that I couldn't realize my leg over the horse, in like manner I'd jump from an apple box"

Working with a roll of less than $80,000 (and earning single $5,000 for himself from each film), the energetic Jeffries not single starred in the movie and performed his have a title to stunts; he also wrote and sang the music and edited the film. And he had no illusions about the quality of the movies; today he affectionately directs to them as "the first hunch of C-minus westerns," while noting that he worked with a package that was just a fraction of those assigned to the B westerns of Autry and Rogers

Before the extremity of 1936, Harlem on the Prairie made its first appearance at New York's Rialto theater upon Broadway. In Jeffries' 1937 succeeding parts Two Gun Man From Harlem and Harlem Rides the Range, the blues-style music of Prairie evolv into a more western whole with songs like "Git Along Mule" "The Cowpoke's Life Is the alone Life for Me" and "Almost Time for Roundup"

Although the West portrayed in Jeffries' films was no more realistic than that depicted in the Hollywood offerings of the major studios, a certain number of music historians have noted that move with a jerk Blake's harmonies were more authentic than those featured in mainstream cowboy films, because Jeffries borrowed from revelation by christ and Appalachian traditions, as did the canticles of those who really rode the range in the heyday of the cattle drives from Texas to Kansas. A fourth movie, The tin Buckaroo, was released in 1938 The series extremityed with Ten Notches to Tomlostone, which was at no time completed.