Patsy Montana secured country music's initial million-selling single by a woman with her 1935 release "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart," while establishing herself as a longtime fixture on Chicago's WLS National Barn Dance. She may also rank as the genre's earliest female session player. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she starred opposite numerous screen cowboys in western features, and her achievements helped shift the male-dominated industry toward accepting and honoring the many women who came after her.
Born Ruby Blevins in Hot Springs, Arkansas, as the eleventh child and only daughter of a farmer, she attended classes in Hope, the hometown of President Bill Clinton. Early exposure to Jimmie Rodgers prompted her to master yodeling along with organ, guitar, and violin. After leaving the University of Western Louisiana, she relocated around 1930 to California alongside an older brother and his wife. There she captured a talent contest and began broadcasting locally under the name "Rubye Blevins, the Yodeling Cowgirl from San Antone," adding the extra "e" for an air of refinement. On KMIC with western performer Stuart Hamblen she united with two other vocalists to create the Montana Cowgirls. The appearance of champion yodeler Monty Montana on the program led her to adopt Montana as a surname, while Hamblen proposed Patsy because another member, Ruthie, created confusion with Ruby on air.
She revisited Arkansas in 1932 and performed briefly on Shreveport's KWKH, drawing notice from local recording artist Jimmie Davis, later famed for "You Are My Sunshine." At that time Davis was cutting a series of suggestive blue-yodel sides for Victor; Montana supplied backing vocals on several and soon received her own recording opportunity. Her first release, issued in 1933, featured "When the Flowers of Montana Are Blooming."
That same year she traveled to Chicago for the Century of Progress World's Fair and an audition at WLS. She connected with the Kentucky Ramblers string band, joined as vocalist, and helped rename the group the Prairie Ramblers to match the station's growing emphasis on cowboy material. She quickly became a regular on the National Barn Dance, then the chief rival to the Grand Ole Opry and a springboard for several western film careers. Although she had worked with the provocative Davis, she stepped out of the studio when the Prairie Ramblers waxed risqué numbers as the Sweet Violet Boys. In 1935, however, she fronted the lively polka-inflected "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart," captured in New York for ARC; the track fused emerging dance rhythms with classic Hollywood cowgirl imagery and became her hallmark, though she also scored with "Rodeo Sweetheart," "Montana Plains," and "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Dream." Her first starring feature, Colorado Sunset with Gene Autry, arrived in 1939.
Montana switched to Decca in 1941 and issued a dozen singles amid the war years. After hosting ABC's Wake Up and Smile program in 1946 and 1947, she settled on an Arkansas farm with husband Paul Rose and their two children, broadcasting daily from Hot Springs and appearing Saturdays on the Louisiana Hayride. She and her husband later returned to California. Montana stayed active on country stages and continued recording; a 1964 live album taped at the Matador Room in Safford, Arizona, featured a young Waylon Jennings on guitar. During the 1980s and 1990s she released several independent albums, some gospel-oriented, before her death on May 3, 1996.
