Trivia: Low-budget company PRC's late entry in the Singing Cowboy sweepstakes, Eddie Dean (born Glosup) had gained some recognition as a singer on the popular National Barn Dance radio program back in 1934 and was later a featured performer on Gene Autry's Melody Ranch and the Judy Canova Show. It was Autry who offered Dean a chance for a movie career. The year was 1938 and the film was Western Jamboree. For the next eight years the rather gawky-looking singer would play supporting roles in scores of low-budget westerns, appearing in five Hopalong Cassidy Westerns (1939-1940) and the serial The Lone Ranger Rides Again (1939). Ironically, Dean was not asked to sing until Harmony Trail (1944), a Ken Maynard Western in which he appeared as himself and performed his own "On the Banks of the Sunny San Juan" and "Boogie Woogie Cowboy." That brought him to the attention of PRC, who was without a singing cowboy star to compete with Republic's Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. The ramshackle little studio certainly believed in his potential, releasing the initial five Eddie Dean music westerns in Cinecolor and thus making Dean the star of the first B-western series in color. Old-timer Emmett Lynn was cast as comic relief and the studio also added the black-garbed Al La Rue, a Humphrey Bogart lookalike destined for B-Western stardom himself. Rather homely in appearance, Dean nevertheless performed well in fights and looked comfortable on a series of ever-changing equine co-stars. Dean later explained that he changed horses often in order never to be upstaged by his four-footed sidekick. Dean's crooning of his own western ballads was of course always one of the films' main selling points, but it wasn't the only one and Dean soon garnered a following among less demanding Western fans. Part of the success may be attributed to the presence of stammering Roscoe Ates, who had replaced Emmett Lynn and would become Dean's best remembered sidekick. Of Dean's films, at least one stands out in the crowded field of low-budget westerns: The Hawk of Powder River (1948), which had a girl villain (Jennifer Holt, whom Dean is forced to kill. In 1946, Dean and Ates appeared in the supporting cast of PRC's Down Missouri Way (1946), the singing cowboy's only non-western until his final film, Varieties on Parade (1951). Mainly due to budget constraints, Eddie Dean never really came close to rivaling the success of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers -- nor indeed the popularity of his non-singing PRC colleague Al La Rue. He continued as a prolific country & western performer and also contributed songs to other artists including "One Has My Name, the Other Has My Heart", a hit for Jimmy Wakely, and "I Dreamed of a Hill Billy Heaven", which became one of Tex Ritter's most successful recordings. In 1978, Eddie Dean received a "Pioneer Award" by the Academy of Country Music and was inducted into the Western Music Association's "Hall of Fame" in 1990. In his last years, Dean was a frequent and very welcome guest at B-Western memorabilia shows.

Trivia: Mississippi-born Roscoe Ates spent a good portion of his childhood overcoming a severe stammer. Entering show business as a concert violinist, the shriveled, pop-eyed Ates found the money was better as a vaudeville comedian, reviving his long-gone stutter for humorous effect. In films from 1929, Ates appeared in sizeable roles in such films as The Champ (1931), Freaks (1932) and Alice in Wonderland (1933), and also starred in his own short subject series with RKO and Vitaphone. Though his trademarked stammer is something of an endurance test when seen today, it paid off in big laughs in the 1930s, when speech impediments were considered the ne plus ultra of hilarity. By the late 1930s Ates's popularity waned, and he was reduced to unbilled bits in such films as Gone with the Wind (1939) and Dixie (1942). His best showing during the 1940s was as comic sidekick to singing cowboy Eddie Dean in a series of 15 low-budget westerns. Remaining busy in films and on TV into the 1960s, Roscoe Ates made his last appearance in the 1961 Jerry Lewis comedy The Errand Boy.

Trivia: As handsome as most of the Western stars he supported, if not more so, Zon Murray (born Emery Zon Murray) often sported a mustache and was thus obviously not up to anything good. Rarely the "Boss Villain," Murray instead played scores of so-called "Dog Heavies" in run-of-the-mill Westerns from 1945 to 1956, ending his long run in the feature film version of The Lone Ranger. There would be a few minor roles in cheap action fare to come, but Murray definitely belonged to the era of the series Western. Very prolific in television as well -- especially on such shows as Gene Autry, Wild Bill Hickock, Roy Rogers, and yes, The Lone Ranger -- Murray seems to have ended his career after a bit in Requiem for a Gunfighter (1965).

Trivia: The son of veteran character actor Charles K. French, Ted French (born Victor Trenwith French) worked for years as a stunt man/bit player in mostly low-budget westerns and serials. In films from at least 1946, French was rarely billed or awarded dialogue, but he could invariably be found among the villain's henchmen or riding with the posse. Working mainly in television in the 1950s, Ted French was the father of Victor French, a popular television personality fondly remembered for his continuing roles on Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven.

Trivia: One of the many unheralded stuntmen of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Carl Mathews (born Carl Davis Mathews) doubled cowboy crooner Fred Scott at Spectrum and Ray "Crash" Corrigan at Republic. Nicknamed "Cherokee" and of Native American heritage, the burly Mathews later supported Al "Lash" LaRue at PRC, usually playing henchmen. His career lasted well into the television era.

Trivia: Someone once called American supporting actor Charles "Slim" Whitaker a "no good yellow-bellied polecat," and that is as good a description as any for this paunchy, mustachioed gent, a former stage manager and stock company actor from Kansas City, MO. Whitaker's screen career was spent almost entirely in B-Westerns, where he would skulk around as lazy ranch hands, tobacco-chewing henchmen, Mexican "half-breeds," and even the occasional corrupt lawman. More versatile than most Western supporting players, Whitaker was adept at comedy as well, and was humorously billed "Slender" Whitaker in 1925's Border Intrigue, in which he played a comedic Mexican bandito. Whitaker, who made his screen bow around 1925, was busiest in the 1930s, appearing in over 25 films in 1935 alone! He continued in pictures through the late '40s, but spent his final years working as a short-order cook in a Hollywood coffee shop.