Columbian Article

At the age of 3, she was in a terrible car accident that left her comatose. She was sent to live with her grandparents who, as retirees, had more time and energy to help the small girl recover, something some weren’t even sure was possible.

While Spencer Marshall didn’t grow up around other children, her grandparents’ home was never dull. Friends and relatives were part of the daily routine. Women in work clothes sang over the stove, and men cradled guitars and fiddles while their voices mingled into one magnificent harmony. All of them were professional musicians at some point in their lives, but all Spencer Marshall knew was great music filled her home. A young child, she assumed her home life was as typical as any. She had no idea those men were once members of The Sons of the Pioneers.

Grandparents sang lullabies, and TV wasn’t missed in a home filled with instruments.

“All they ever did was play music together, and I grew up in the fold of that,” she said.

At 11, she moved back to eastern Oregon to live with her parents, but she never really left the music and the memories behind. It was when she hit her 20s and started her own family that she began thinking back to her own childhood. The memories were triggered in part by watching old black-and-white movies when her young children kept her up at night.

“I’d see these old movies, cowboy movies, and it would spark something,” she said. “I began to wonder.”

She wanted to know why her family had such an affinity for the songs sung in those old cowboy movies. She delved into her past, plucking songs from memory and tracing their roots.

The journey led her to author Ken Griffis, who wrote Hear My Song: The Story of the Celebrated Sons of the Pioneers, a book about the classic western music of the singing cowboy days. They spoke on the phone and, after hearing her genuine interest, he shipped her a copy of the book he wrote in the 1970s.

The book confirmed what Spencer Marshall was starting to figure out. The famous classic western group The Sons of the Pioneers’ founding members were some of those people she grew up listening to playing music and harmonizing in her grandparents’ home.

One member, Tim Spencer, was her grandfather’s first cousin. Another was Bob Nolan, a prolific western songwriter. The third was a man named Leonard Slye, whom Spencer Marshall remembers as “Uncle Lenny.”

That friendly man, she learned, was known to most of the world as Roy Rogers, a name he adopted when his acting career took off.

“I was starting to make the connections, but that just verified it. I only had snippets of it,” she said.

Griffis, who is 80 and grew up watching and listening to these artists, said while The Sons of the Pioneers “created a new form of American folk music,” the group didn’t set out to make a permanent mark on American music and film culture.

“It all came out of the Depression and the need for work,” he said.

Spencer and Rogers first met picking fruit for Del Monte in central California. Their families were part of the great migration West, coming from various states in the central part of the country, Spencer Marshall said.

“They were using their music to keep from starving, and it just caught on,” she said.

Eventually, movie studios began making more Western pictures and better technology made it easier to introduce the singing cowboys.

The Sons of the Pioneers and other groups began writing songs for these movies, which paved the way for singers such as Rogers to break into the film industry. “Western music is a part of the history of America. It really helped the movies to gain popularity,” Griffis said. “But western music lost a great deal of its appeal after the Western movies lost their appeal.”

Many songs were sold to the movie companies and never recorded elsewhere, Spencer Marshall said. While a few popular tunes can still be found, such as “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Cool Water,” songs that never made it into a film vanished.

Spencer Marshall wanted to recover those songs to create a collection that represented all of the musicians’ talents.

With little record of these songs and before the advent of the Internet, Spencer Marshall found herself on a quest that, at times, seemed impossible. She had to dig deep into her memory to recall snippets of songs she’d heard as a child and hope that someone could help identify the tune.

That’s how she rediscovered that song Nolan wrote, “Slumber Time on the Range.”

McDonald, the researcher she called for help, shipped her video clips of many of the songs cut from films. Nearly all the video on a clip of “Slumber Time on the Range” was faded, but the audio was discernible.

She was enchanted by the voices, and seeing the faded faces reassured her that her memory was correct and her crusade not hardly in vain.

As she was piecing together the history, she realized what her family had lost artistically and financially. As the movies were condensed for TV and the songs completely cut out, there was no longer any record of their work. And with movie studios owning the rights, they couldn’t even re-record most of the songs.

“That was part of the sadness,” she said. “They thought that the songs would be there as long as the movie was out there.”

After finding several songs and tracing their history, Spencer Marshall faced another hurdle: tracking down copyrights and requesting permission to record the songs.

“This project took a long time to get going,” said Stacy Phillips, a friend of Spencer Marshall’s and a fellow musician and teacher. Phillips lives in New Haven, Conn., but the two frequently saw each other at music camps around the country. Phillips was one of more than a dozen musicians and vocalists Spencer Marshall hired to perform 23 songs for the album. “It wasn’t just a gig,” Phillips said. “This is absolutely rare stuff. It’s part of our history.”

The group of musicians that recorded the music, including Spencer Marshall, performed the songs in the spirit of The Sons of the Pioneers. Spencer Marshall was particular about the musicians she selected and kept studio time to a minimum because she wanted to capture spontaneity. The end result is a collection that respects the old and revives this American music through the eyes of today’s musicians, Phillips said.

“What I’m doing is preserving a music style and the family’s history,” Spencer Marshall said. “My grandparents did so much for me at a time when my life could have be ruined. They gave me all their joy, which was the music.”

Today she shares that same joy with her grandson, Clayton Marshall, whom she is raising. Much like her mother wasn’t so interested in her parents’ music, Spencer Marshall’s own children were never quite as intrigued. But Clayton, 9, loves it.

On a recent trip to visit Spencer Marshall’s mother in La Grande, Ore., Clayton sat in the back seat of the family car. The two soaked up the beautiful scenery along the Columbia River Gorge and sang those songs. It is her turn to share the music with another generation.