Born on 16 August 1925 in Fort Worth, Texas, Fess Parker pursued acting and singing after earlier stage appearances. His motion-picture debut arrived in 1952 with the western Untamed Frontier, which paired Joseph Cotton and Shelley Winters. Two years afterward he portrayed the celebrated frontiersman, congressman and Alamo hero Davy Crockett across three installments of the Disneyland television series. Those broadcasts generated enormous popularity, and the accompanying theme, “The Ballad Of Davy Crockett,” composed by scriptwriter Tom Blackburn and George Bruns, reached number one on the U.S. charts in a recording by Bill Hayes, already familiar to viewers from Show Of Shows. Parker subsequently cut his own rendition, which climbed into the U.S. Top 10. The 1955 theatrical release Davy Crockett, King Of The Wild Frontier! triggered a national craze for coonskin caps that extended overseas, prompting the follow-up Davy Crockett And The River Pirates in 1956. That same year he headlined Walt Disney’s Westward Ho, The Wagons!, a production that introduced five original songs, among them “Wringle Wrangle,” Parker’s final chart entry. Additional screen credits through the sixties encompassed The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), Old Yeller (1957—the first in Disney’s long line of boy-and-dog stories), The Hangman (1959) and the World War II drama Hell Is For Heroes (1962), featuring Steve McQueen and Bobby Darin. On television he shared the spotlight with country singer Red Foley in a 1962 series adaptation of Lewis R. Foster’s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Two years later he resumed frontier roles as the title figure in Daniel Boone, a program that continued until 1968. In 1972 he portrayed a stern lawman in the television film Climb An Angry Mountain. Following his retirement from entertainment, Parker settled in Santa Barbara, California, and turned first to real-estate ventures. He later became proprietor of the Red Lion Resort and Parker Winery, expanding into a regional business figure whose wines were distributed across more than thirty states by the early 1990s.
