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: "Ask any stunt man who his favorite stunt man is," wrote film historian Alan Barbour in 1970, "and chances are nine out of ten of them will answer David Sharpe. " In vaudeville from childhood, Sharpe was a superb athlete, the winner of the A.A.U. tumbling championship and several other competitions. Beginning his film career in his teens, Sharpe could literally double for anybody, be they husky he-men like Allan Lane and Kane Richmond or petite actresses like Kay Aldridge and Frances Gifford. His work in such Republic serials as The Adventures of Captain Marvel (love that back-flip!) and Spy Smasher has entered the realm of legend. A personable actor, Sharpe was one of the leads in Hal Roach's "Boy Friends" 2-reelers of the early 1930s. Remaining active into the 1970s, Sharpe doubled for Tony Curtis in Blake Edwards' The Great Race and made innumerable appearances on Red Skelton's TV show, usually cast as a somersaulting little old lady. Sadly, David Sharpe spent his last years in complete immobility, suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

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: Veteran American character actor Forrest Taylor is reputed to have launched his film career in 1915. His screen roles in both the silent and sound era seldom had any consistency of size; he was apt to show up in a meaty character part one week, a seconds-lasting bit part the next. With his banker's moustache and brusque attitude, Taylor was most often cast as a businessman or a lawyer, sometimes on the shadier side of the law. Throughout his 40 year film career, Taylor was perhaps most active in westerns, appearing in such programmers as Headin' For the Rio Grande and Painted Trail. From 1952 through 1954, Forrest Taylor costarred as Grandpa Fisher on the religious TV series This is the Life.

Trivia: American actor Dennis Moore made his first stage appearance with a Texas stock company in 1932. If his official bio is to be believed, Moore was 18 at the time, casting some doubt over his claim of having been a commercial pilot before inaugurating his acting career. Whatever the case, it is a matter of record that Moore entered films in 1936 when he was discovered by a Columbia Pictures talent scout. Two years later, he made the first of his many Westerns at Republic Pictures. In his earliest sagebrush appearances, he was a bit player, stunt man, or villain; in 1940, he attained his first cowboy leading role in The Man From Tascosa, though he would continue to take bad-guy parts (notably as a serial killer in the East Side Kids' 1941 feature Spooks Run Wild) even after his good-guy debut. In 1943, Moore joined Ray "Crash" Corrigan and Max Terhune as a member of the Range Busters in the Monogram Western series of the same name. Until his retirement from films in 1957, Moore alternated between Westerns and such serials as The Purple Monster Strikes (1945). Dennis Moore owns the distinction of starring in the last serial ever made by Republic, King of the Carnival (1956), and the last serial ever made in Hollywood, Columbia's Blazing the Overland Trail (1956).

Trivia: Better known for her rather tumultuous personal life than any screen role, brunette Abigail Adams (born Margaret Adams) was voted the "typical American girl" by that arbiter of female pulchritude, Harry Conover. The ensuing notoriety landed the South Carolinian a position as Ella Logan's understudy in the long running (1941-1943) Broadway musical Sons O' Fun and, in time, a contract with MGM. Although known primarily for her cheesecake layouts and a notorious four-year marriage to veteran actor Lyle Talbot, Adams did find time to decorate such films as Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1944), Colorado Serenade (1946), and Trapped By Boston Blackie (1948) before landing the title role in a Grade-B musical from Columbia Pictures, Mary Lou. It proved her cinematic farewell but she kept popping up in the gossip pages, primarily for attempting suicide in 1950 and for a long-running and highly volatile relationship with Broadway legend George Jessel. Her death in 1955 was caused by an overdose of seconal.

Trivia: Irish-born Robert McKenzie was already a theatrical showman of some renown by the time he made his first film appearance in 1921. The barrel-chested, snaggle-toothed McKenzie appeared in dozens of westerns and comedies, usually as a bombastic lawman or backwoods con artist. Even when he played bits (which was often), his raspy voice and hyena-like laugh always identified him. His more memorable feature-film roles included W. C. Fields' drinking buddy Charlie Bogle in You're Telling Me (1934), larcenous Judge Roy Dean in Gene Autry's Sing, Cowboy, Sing (1937), and the jolly captain who rents Laurel & Hardy a broken-down boat in Saps at Sea (1940). In addition, he appeared in hundreds of short subjects, playing opposite the likes of Our Gang, Andy Clyde, Charley Chase and the Three Stooges. In 1927, McKenzie tried his hand at screenwriting with the low-budget western The White Outlaw. Robert McKenzie and his actress-wife Eva had three daughters, all of whom acted in films at one time or another; their daughter Ella was the wife of comedian Billy Gilbert.

Trivia: A frequent presence in PRC and other low-budget Westerns of the 1940s, Bob Duncan later wrote television episodes with his wife, Wanda, including several segments of Lost in Space. The former actor committed suicide in 1967.

Trivia: Though never officially billed as Charles "Blackie" King, American actor Charlie King played so many "Blackies" in B-westerns that one is astounded to discover that it wasn't his middle name. Drifting into films in the '20s, the squat, stubble-chinned, mustachioed King picked up minor roles as chauffeurs, interns and bridegrooms in the two-reel comedies of such performers as Our Gang, the Three Stooges and Leon Errol. It was during the B-western boom of the early talkie era that King really came into his own, showing up in virtually every other poverty-row oater as a gang boss, lynch-mob leader or sinister henchman. Evidently King felt the day was wasted if he wasn't dynamiting a dam, setting fire to homesteaders' shacks, or engaging the hero in a fistic battle. Outtakes of these westerns have revealed that this "human monster" was actually shy and soft-spoken, never reverting to profanity when blowing his lines (more than can be said for some of the "clean-living" western heroes of the era). In fact, King's private life was governed by his formidable wife, who had spies posted at the studio to make certain that King came home right away with his paycheck without any side trips to bars or gaming tables. Gaining a beard and excess weight in the late '40s, King began appearing less frequently as villains and more often as roly-poly comedy relief. King literally died with his boots on, suffering a heart attack after shooting a 1957 episode of Gunsmoke -- in which he played a corpse! William K. Everson's 1964 coffee-table book The Bad Guys was affectionately dedicated to the scurrilously prolific Charles "Blackie" King.

Trivia: Lantern-jawed Warner P. Richmond (the initial stood for Paul) had enjoyed a stage career touring with such plays as Eyes of Youth, Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and As a Man Thinks, prior to making his screen debut for the Vitagraph company in 1912. Typecast as a villain almost from the beginning, Richmond enjoyed one of the busiest and longest careers in Hollywood history, often playing characters with names such as Danny, the Dude, Bowery Blackie, or Pop Eye Jackson. In his later years, Richmond turned up in scores of B-Westerns, usually not on the side of the angels. He finished his long career playing villains in Eddie Dean music Westerns for PRC.