Beech Tree News Network

One night, Garey came to bed singing, “Johnny Yuma was a rebel…He roamed through the west…He wandered alone…He searched this land this rebel lad…And he had no star as he wandered far…And the only law was a hook and draw…The rebel, that’s right…Johnny Yuma was a rebel.”

                “Who the heck is Johnny Yuma?” I asked, as I raised my weary head from the pillow and looked at Garey like he’d lost his mind.

                “You know, Johnny Yuma, the Western,” Garey said.

                I stared blankly.

 “He was the main character in the TV show, THE REBEL,” he said.

                I lay my head back down.  “I have no idea who you’re talking about,” I said, as I rolled over and went back to sleep.

                It’s not unusual for Garey to sing theme songs from old Westerns.  It is unusual for him to sing one I don’t recognize.  I watched all those thirty-minute Westerns he did when I was a kid.  If you watched TV back then, that’s what you had to watch.  It’s like trying to find something on today’s network TV besides reality shows.

                I don’t really care much for Westerns, and no, I’m not a Communist.  I blame my Uncle Phillip for the distaste I have for the genre.  He and my Aunt Loretta took my sisters and me to the drive-in movies to see a triple feature of Clint Eastwood films.  I was probably 14 or 15 at the time.  I think it was the abandoned stagecoach scene, with the flies swarming the dead bodies that tipped me over the edge.

                The morning after Garey serenaded me with the Johnny Yuma song, I searched for it online.  Turns out THE REBEL show on TV was a spin off from the original movie, which was called JOHNNY YUMA.  According to Wikipedia.com, this movie falls under a subgenre of Westerns called Spaghetti Westerns.  The term Spaghetti Western was coined by critics of the movies, which were mostly directed, produced and filmed in Italy and Spain, by Italians.  Many of these low-budget movies were filmed in the Tabernas Desert in southeastern Spain, in order to mimic the scenery in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico.

                Spaghetti Westerns started showing up in this country in the mid-1960s, after successes by producers like Sergio Leone, most notably his Clint Eastwood films, MAN WITH NO NAME and A FIST FULL OF DOLLARS.  Leone followed these with FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, also starring Eastwood.  (It was that Eastwood trilogy that I saw with my Uncle Philip.)

                The Spaghetti Western differed from the Westerns produced in this country at the time in the way the protagonist in the film is portrayed.  In John Wayne movies, for example, the hero is 100 percent good, and the bad guy is, well, bad…100 percent bad.  If you’ve ever seen one of those Clint Eastwood Westerns, you know the characters he plays are both good and bad. 

                I still haven’t seen JOHNNY YUMA or THE REBEL.  I’ve learned some of the theme song, though, thanks to Garey’s continuing to sing it.  The song was written by Richard Markowitz and Andrew J. Fenady.  I read that Johnny Cash also recorded it in 1961 (westernwriting.com).

                You know, I’m supposed to be the musician and writer in the family, but I can’t sing half the theme songs Garey can sing.  I probably knew them at one time, but I hum through a lot of the lyrics that I can no longer remember.  Garey never misses a word.  He knows the theme songs to SUGAR FOOT, BRONCO, BAT MASTERSON, CHEYENNE, PALADEN and BRANDED.  Those are just the ones I can remember right now.  He’s got a whole Western theme-song anthology in his repertoire.

                We’ve been married for 46 years.  Surely, with the addition of JOHNNY YUMA, I’ve heard them all.  Maybe, I’ll write one of my own.  You know, just make up a character and give him a theme song.  Sing it to Garey one night after we’ve gone to bed.  Try to make him think he missed one.  On second thought, he’d probably get up the next morning singing the song I’d sung to him the night before.  I’d have to just hum along, because there’s no way I could remember the lyrics.