Rex Allen

Better-known as the Arizona Cowboy, Rex Allen stood as Hollywood’s final singing cowboy. Between 1950 and 1954 he appeared in nineteen features for Republic Pictures, and those screen roles quickly opened doors to a recording career that produced several chart singles and albums before the singing-cowboy era faded from the airwaves.

Born to a fiddle-playing father who gave him a guitar at age eleven so the boy could accompany dances, Rex Allen began singing soon afterward. After high school he briefly performed on a Phoenix radio station before leaving for the rodeo circuit, where a bull-riding injury ended that chapter and returned him to music; in 1943 the station WTTM in Trenton, New Jersey, hired him as a singer.

Once he departed WTTM, Allen joined the Sleepy Hollow Ranch Gang in Pennsylvania. During the summer of 1946, Lulu Belle & Scotty noticed him and urged him to audition for the National Barn Dance on Chicago’s WLS. He became a favorite in the Windy City and was among the first country-and-western artists Mercury Records signed. The label issued several of his singles until “Afraid” became a hit in 1949, the same year he relocated to Hollywood.

Carrying a CBS network radio show with him, Allen approached Republic Pictures, which cast him in the 1950 release The Arizona Cowboy. Its success launched a run of nineteen musical Westerns that continued until February 1954, each featuring Allen alongside a changing roster of sidekicks that included Slim Pickens, Buddy Ebsen, and Fuzzy Knight.

Screen popularity translated into the 1951 Mercury single “Sparrow in the Tree Top,” which reached the country Top Ten and the pop Top Thirty. Shortly afterward he moved to Decca Records, where “Crying in the Chapel” (1953) climbed to the country Top Five and the pop Top Ten. Later in the decade he recorded several albums of Western material and appeared in thirty-nine episodes of the television series Frontier Doctor.

In the 1960s Allen rejoined Mercury and scored modest chart entries plus the major 1962 success “Don’t Go Near the Indians,” which returned him to the country Top Ten and the pop Top Twenty. Additional Mercury singles from the period included “Marines Let’s Go” (1961) and “Tear After Tear” (1964). By the late sixties he had returned to Decca, where “Tiny Bubbles” gave him a minor hit in 1968. During those years and into the early seventies he also cut albums for Disneyland, Buena Vista, and JMI, yet he remained most visible as narrator for numerous Walt Disney films and television programs and as a voice actor in several Disney cartoons.

During the 1980s his eldest son, Rex Allen, Jr., established his own career. A museum honoring Allen opened in his hometown of Willcox, Arizona, and the state’s governor presented him with an official tribute. He continued occasional appearances in Western film projects and remained a familiar figure to fans until December 17, 1999, when his caretaker accidentally struck him with a car; he was seventy-eight.