In February 1974, less than two months after establishing his Apollo Troupe, L. Ron Hubbard saw the need for a greater variety of performances. Prior to the
forming of a country western styled group, the Rangers, he researched the genre and drafted the following analysis of the style.

n looking over the various types of music including Irish ballads, recent country music albums, I have gotten certain data which is of interest.
There is a whole school of “country western” which is the Roy Rogers/Gene Autry School of Hollywood Soundtrack. Such pieces as “Wagon Wheels,” “Ghost Riders,” and others were written by Hollywood song writers in order to fill the tremendous lack of actual pieces in the Western catalog, and if you listen to these you will see that they bear little or no resemblance to actual country music. They are actually an orchestra usually of the most ordinary type backing up one or four or five singers who are then singing the Hollywood idea of what they think maybe cowboys should sound like in the idea of audiences. There is very little interest in this so far as we are concerned and you might as well forget the whole field of Hollywood Western country music.

In researching this, I find that the music written before 1850 is far more melodious with many more tunes than that written after 1850. Therefore, the heyday of the Old West is actually more or less cancelled out as far as being a source of Western music. These songs from 1850 to, let us say, 1890, are more of a ballad type. The melodies are quite ordinary, even nonexistent. The moment that you compare these to the pre-1850 period you are struck with the fact that an entirely different era of music existed. This is mainly due to the existence of minstrels in the Mississippi Steamboat River days prior to 1850. Minstrel men were, of course, white men in blackface, and their songs bore little or no resemblance to actual Mississippi River colored population singing. The top writers in this field, of course, include Stephen Foster and his enormous catalog of music. The pre-1850 period contains practically all the ‘49er music. To get the idea of this difference, one only has to think of “O Susanna,” and compare it to the dying cowboy to get the idea. It is not that the post-1850 pieces were necessarily only sad. It was that they were slanted toward meaning and words and vocalization whereas the earlier ones had a dependency on music and were actually written by top-flight song writers like Stephen Foster.

I find that country music as played modernly could be greatly improved providing you went back to the source material on the actual instrumentation. The Irish flooded into America and brought with them a fiddle and a certain swing that got into the dance music which was being played in the Middle West from the first days that the Middle West existed. The Irish took it out with them with the railroads which they built.

Therefore, there are two sources of melody and these consist of the potpourri 1850 songs and the Irish imported songs.

There is, as well, a considerable body of music which is simply the dance music which was played in the Middle West, but this again is directly derived from the Irish. The hillbilly bands added their contribution and this was sorted out by Hollywood and made rather popular. But it does not bear very much resemblance to the dance music of the Middle West. This dance music, by the way, was revived by the Ford Foundation and consists of reels and hoedowns which they popularized at the same time that they taught the Middle Western people around Ohio to dance old-time square dances, and there was a whole square dance program by the Ford Foundation. So probably a great deal of this music is in arrangement form. This is a direct source of sheet music for the authentic reels and hoe-downs and square dances of the early West.

Out of all the bands and types of music, however, the one least pushed and by actual test the most popular is the cowboy band.

The cowboy band was a sort of a cross between the Middle Western square dance music and the Mexican band music. Cowboys were not able to carry around very much in the way of instruments and their cowboy bands had a tendency to be very shrill and very sharp. Their drum, for instance, was almost never a snare and consisted mainly in its largest size of something like a military drum except, of course, when you’d see one of these cowboy bands in a rodeo.

The cowboy band is, in itself, more representative of Western music and country western than any of the other bands or groups or assemblies.

You, of course, know Herb Alpert’s trumpet. Well, this is certainly nothing more than a Mexican trumpet. But this was imported into the cowboy band and the cowboy band was characterized very often by a screaming fiddle and a very shrill trumpet based in with a guitar, melodied with a harmonica and given cut with any other instrument which came to hand which could, of course, be a mandolin or a banjo. This gives a far more authentic sound to Western music than most of the other combos which are around. Unfortunately, there is practically no music written for this particular grouping of which I have any knowledge.

Much more interesting is the actual scene of country music and this has been practically lost. I myself have seen this many, many, many years ago, and have seen these various dances and have seen singers and the instrumentalists presenting square dances, and they are very remarkable. There is an awful lot of sole of the foot slapping as opposed to heel beating in jazz or flamenco. It is called stomp or slap. This characterizes the choreography of a hoedown. You can get some idea of the music punctuated with the percussion of slaps when you realize that after a certain riff, why, then there’s immediate slap-pop of the flat of the feet followed with another riff and then a stomp-stomp. This dancing approximates horses. And with this type of percussion you get the reason why, I think, the square dances were so popular and possibly even why they sort of linger in people’s memories. They were very, very active and the percussion was mostly live.

    The Barn Dance