Hollywood’s First “Black Singing Cowboy,” Herb Jeffries, Would Have Loved Beyoncé

Westerns were the most popular film genre of the 1930s, with plots that offered escapism, romance, and adventure amid the Great Depression. Audiences of all kinds thronged to theater rows and balconies to watch stars like Mix play the Hollywood-embellished myth of the cowboy as a timeless and heroic figure. Yet movie theaters were still segregated, and Black and brown audiences watched actors and storylines that didn’t reflect their realities.

Black-identifying himself, Jeffries took seriously both the honor and the responsibility of representing a new Western hero. He saw a pile of unmade scripts on Buell’s desk. At random, he picked one up with a generic Western title—Sunset on the Prairie—and proposed they simply use a screenplay that was already written, adding specific tweaks that would resonate with Black audiences. Sunset on the Prairie became Harlem on the Prairie.

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