Why Tex Ritter Considered Fort Worth a Second Home

Cowtown was more than a tour stop for one of the Lone Star State’s most notable country music pioneers.

by

Likely nobody will flash on the name of Woodward Maurice Ritter as a prominent figure in cowhand lore.

But plant the nickname of “Tex” in there, and eyes will light up and senses will quicken at recognition of one of the great frontier balladeers, movie cowboys, and honky-tonk jukebox Westerners.

As Tex Ritter, the artist ranged the continent, Broadway to Hollywood to Nashville, but he considered Fort Worth his home as a chronic visitor and now-and-again resident, with frequent appearances on WBAP-Television and at movie premieres and Stock Show & Rodeo events.

“Not to mention,” Ritter reminded me in a late-in-life conversation, “that Fort Worth gave me one of my bigger hit records.”

The reference was to Ritter’s 1948 recording of “Fort Worth Jail,” a bittersweet first-person lament composed in 1941 as a beer-parlor ballad by Fort Worth guitarist Dick Reinhart.

Whether Ritter (or Reinhart, for that matter) might have known the local hoosegow as an erstwhile inmate is beside the point: Ritter kept a residential suite at the Stockyards District’s landmark Maverick Hotel, but when he sang, “Way down in Fort Worth jailhouse / Feelin’ kind of low,” he hit a persuasively mournful note. (Various other artists would record the same tune, ranging in tone from Ernest Tubb’s low-down existential complaint to a drolly self-amused novelty version by Spike Jones & His City Slickers.)

Nowadays, the most emphatic reminder of Tex Ritter’s presence is a Texas Trail of Fame star in Fort Worth’s Rodeo Plaza, near Billy Bob’s Texas. The site is not far from M.L. Leddy’s Boots & Saddlery, the historic outfitter where Ritter preferred to have his boots custom-designed, some with golf cleats to indulge a favorite sport.

Ritter (1905-1974) brought a cultural authenticity to his recording-and-acting career — not so much as a working cowboy, although he knew his way around a corral, as in the role of a Western folk-music scholar. Ritter also possessed a natural-born entertainer’s gift for preserving authentic cattle-trail lyrics and interpreting them in an endearingly personalized manner. Along the way into hit-record territory and cowboy-movie stardom, Ritter also became the patriarch of an acting family, including son John Ritter and grandsons Jason Ritter and Tyler Ritter.

My family knew Tex as a frequent visitor from Hollywood, owing to his friendship with my Uncle Grady L. Wilson, an Amarillo-based theatre operator who ballyhooed every new Tex Ritter movie with the same zeal he would apply to the latest big-studio, Oscar-bait pictures. Tex autographed for me many a publicity photograph and movie poster, usually inscribing such gifts with “A mi amigo, Mike — your compadre, Tex.”

Ritter was born into a farming household at Murvaul, Texas, attended school in Carthage, Texas, and Beaumont. He entered the University of Texas at Austin in 1922, intending a career in law and politics. The college also connected him with the likes of J. Frank Dobie, Oscar J. Fox, and John Lomax. These prominent authorities on cowboy lore encouraged Ritter to seek a career in performance.

By 1928, Ritter had landed a weekly half-hour program on KPRC-Radio in Houston. That same year, he moved to New York and joined the masculine chorus of the Broadway show “The New Moon.” He appeared as cowpuncher Cord Elam in the Broadway production of “Green Grow the Lilacs” (1931), which became the basis of a perennial musical-theatre extravaganza — “Oklahoma!”

In 1932, Ritter starred in New York’s first Western-lore broadcast, “The Lone Star Rangers” on WOR-Radio, where he sang and related tales of the Western frontier. Ritter wrote and starred in “Cowboy Tom’s Roundup” at WINS-Radio, a daily program for children, and in 1933 he joined Columbia Records with the traditional trail ballad “Goodbye, Ol’ Paint” as a début selection. In 1935, he signed with the Decca label, where he recorded his first original tunes including the now-standard “Whoopee Ti-Yi-Yo,” and racked up nearly 30 songs on 78-rpm shellac platters through 1939. (Shellac, a sturdy but brittle organic substance with a hauntingly sweet aroma, was the standard material for phonograph records until petroleum-based vinyl proved more durable during the postwar years.)

In 1936, Ritter moved to Los Angeles. His motion-picture début occurred in “Song of the Gringo.” He starred in a dozen low-budget Westerns for Grand National Pictures, including “Headin’ for the Rio Grande” and “Trouble in Texas.” A recurring co-star was Rita Hayworth, known at the time by her ancestral name, Rita Cansino.

The collapse of Grand National found Ritter moving to the similarly small but better-heeled Monogram Pictures, which starred him in 40-someodd cowboy-crooner pictures. Four of these titles featured Ritter’s wife-to-be, Dorothy Fay — “Song of the Buckaroo,” “Sundown on the Prairie,” “Rollin’ Westward,” and “Rainbow over the Range” (1938-1940).

In 1939’s “Riders of the Range,” Ritter developed a forward-thinking buddy-team routine with the pioneering Black comedian Mantan Moreland (himself a member of Fort Worth’s emerging jazz-club scene). The picture finds Moreland and Ritter sharing a lively discussion of the fallacies of prejudice before launching into a comical duet on the traditional “Boll Weevil Song.” Ritter moved from Monogram to big-time Universal Pictures and teamed with Johnny Mack Brown for early-1940s films such as “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “The Lone Star Trail,” “Raiders of San Joaquin,” “Cheyenne Roundup,” and “The Old Chisholm Trail.”

When Universal became threatened with bankruptcy, Ritter stepped down a rung to tiny Producers Releasing Corp. for eight features during 1944-1945. These completed, Ritter shied away from the grind of leading man acting until 1950, when he began handling backup roles or appearing in incidental cameos, as himself. Ritter faced larger prospects, of course, in the recording industry.

In 1942, he had become one of the earliest contract-artists at Capitol Records, establishing a countrified musical identity that would define the label despite its additional interests in pop music, jazz, and kid-stuff records. Ritter’s Capitol hits have become standards: “I’m Wastin’ My Tears on You,” a country-to-pop crossover, along with “There’s a New Moon over My Shoulder,” “You Two-Timed Me One Time Too Often,” “Rye Whiskey,” and “Pecos Bill.” Not to mention “Fort Worth Jail.”

Larger fortunes beckoned anew from Hollywood, in the form of Ritter’s vocal performance on the title song for the Western drama “High Noon.” Ritter landed that assignment after Pete Seeger & the Weavers, the celebrated civil-rights quartet, had rejected the song as lacking in social conscience. Ritter’s rendition of “High Noon” (“Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darlin’”) became a hit record in its own right and received the Oscar in 1953 for Best Motion Picture Song.

Then in 1958, Ritter’s first full-length LP-record album traded upon his dual identity as a music-and-movies figure — Songs from the Western Screen. He established himself during the 1960s as a representative of the Grand Ole Opry and portrayed himself in the 1966 film “Nashville Rebel,” which marked a début for Waylon Jennings in an early assertion of the “outlaw country” movement. Ritter’s 1967 single, “Just Beyond the Moon,” hit No. 3 on Billboard magazine’s C&W chart.

In 1970, Ritter renewed his interest in politics with a bid for U.S. Senator from Tennessee. He lost the primary election to U.S. Rep. Bill Brock, who proceeded to win the general election. Ritter took solace in the more lasting accomplishments of parallel Nashville/Hollywood careers, and in his rank as a co-founder of the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation.