“You Play That Song Like Always”

Though little scholarly attention has been paid to music in the early sound Western, the genre was a venue for big-budget experimentation from 1929 to 1931 and served as a showcase for sound film’s possibilities. This article explores the range of musical approaches taken by practitioners of the genre by examining music’s use in four high-profile films: The Virginian (1929), Under a Texas Moon (1930), Fighting Caravans (1931) and Cimarron (1931). The Western came with two built-in advantages for musical experimentation: the old West had for decades been understood as a heavily musical space, and it was set in a period far removed from most spectators’ knowledge. The Western thus became a venue of musical extremes, with practitioners trying a naturalistic approach to singing, a parodic song-plugging approach, and a wall-to-wall approach that constituted a throwback to silent-era scoring. Examining these four films sheds light on the diversity of musical experiments found in the early sound era and shows how seeds were planted for the genre’s later uses of music.