ABSTRACT
American country singer and guitarist, actor, songwriter, and business executive; born Orvon Autry in Tioga, Texas. His style of cowboy song became the mode of a more sophisticated country music, superseding the simpler hillbilly style. He taught himself guitar while working as a telegraph operator in Oklahoma, and was lucky enough to be heard by a customer named Will Rogers. Rogers told him to go into radio, and Autry found a job with an Oklahoma station. By 1929 he was well known in the region. He was the first person to record cowboy songs, one of the first being his own composition “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine,” which was a great best seller in the early 1930s. He wrote more that 250 songs. The singer was highly popular on the Chicago radio show National Barn Dance, and in 1934 he had a small singing role in a western film, In Old Santa Fe; eventually he made more than 100 feature pictures. He had a radio show, too, Melody Ranch, from 1939 to 1956.
