Soundtrack Saturday

As a child in the 1970s I was pretty much raised on TV Westerns. My Mum was/ is a huge fan and they were on television all the time. With fewer channels but also a smaller back catalogue of programmes, repeats of 60s films and TV shows was a way for air time to be filled cheaply. My childhood TV and film memories are a blur of cowboys, the prairies, Plains Indians, gun fights, saloons, wagon trains and the theme tunes connected to them. Rawhide was one of my Mum's favourites, a black and white show that ran from 1959 to 1965 and featured a young Clint Eastwood. The theme tune, sung by Frankie Laine, the life of the cowhand depicted with some realism, is a staple...

Rawhide

The Hollywood Westerns films had big themes. The Magnificent 7 seems to have been on a permanent loop of Saturday afternoon TV, the all star cast riding in to help out a village of Mexicans and save them from bandits. John Sturges' 1960 film, with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen (who disliked each other apparently) plus Charles Bronson, James Coburg, Robert Vaughan and Horst Buchholtz, never fails to bring about a Proustian Rush, and Elmer Bernstein's theme tune is epic Western personified...

The two big Western TV shows were Bonanza and The High Chaparral, seemingly on loop on the BBC. Bonanza was my Mum's favourite, those Cartwright boys making a living out west for fourteen seasons and 431 episodes, from 1959 through to 1973. Adam was eldest Cartwright boy. Make of that what you will. At least I wasn't named Hoss. Or Little Joe. The theme tune is a twiddly joy. 

The High Chaparral was a rival studio's challenge to Bonanza's weekly TV 60s supremacy in the States, with Big John Cannon and his family trying to make a go at ranching in Arizona, in Apache territory. The Native Americans were not always portrayed as sympathetically as they should have been in either series but in The High Chaparral they sometimes got the upper hand and Big John's disagreements were sometimes with the army whose treatment of the Indians was much worse. Big John had more of a live and let live attitude. David Rose's The High Chaparral theme tune is cut from similar cloth as the Bonanza one (both were orchestrated by Rose)... 

We had one of those Great Western Themes albums that knocked around by our Dansette when we were children along with some Beatles singles, Baron Knights 7"s, a compilation of 60s hits played by top London studio session musicians (the first pop songs I can remember were on this- Windmills Of Your Mind, Get Back, Harlem Shuffle and The Boxer are the ones that stuck with me). Those Western Themes albums were massive charity shop fodder, along with Tijuana Brass, marching bands and Paul Young, but I don't own one now. Maybe I should hit the chazzers and find one. 

In 1977 Star Wars came along, the 1960s Star Trek were early evening TV gold and in 1978 a friend passed me a copy of Starlord, the British sci fi comic that later merged with 2000AD. Both had a kind of sci fi realism/ dystopia, horror and social comment mixed with science fiction and fantasy and from that point, science fiction began to replace the Western.