' The Ballad Of Davy Crockett ' : #1 Sixty-five Years Ago Today

I didn't watch the TV show, though I did watch The Mickey Mouse Club frequently.

However, at some point in my young life I inherited a bunch of 78s from my uncle, housed in a red box with a handle (which is still in my basement as I write this). It was one of those with the manilla dividers, and it came with those little square numbered stickers that you put on the record labels, and then indexed on the last manilla divider.

Song #1 was the Bill Hayes version of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" on the Cadence label. I played it so much that I pretty much wore out the grooves, and can still hear every bit of it my head 64 years later.

I was also a fan of the B-side, "Farewell." Something about that simple guitar, the cowboy harmonies and all, really got to me. There was a brief time when I was a freshman in college and doing coffee house shows when I actually added this song to my repertoire.

 

My parents had a Disney record with The Ballad of Davy Crockett on it. It was the first record I would play myself, over and over. Then during a trip to Disneyland there it was...my first coon skin cap! I think I went thru 2 or 3 of them before I got tired of them. Of course I also had the cap firing musket.
Then if I remember right The Ballad of the Green Berets came out and I moved on to beret's and plastic hand grenade's for a time.

 

I must have learned the Davy Crockett theme "by osmosis," as they say. While I wasn't born until 1959, seems like Crockett mania so permeated the culture you couldn't not be aware of it. I only vaguely remember watching him toting his rifle and walking through trees and brush, but we never were a Crockett family.

This is a quote from IMDb: " I'm half-horse, half-alligator and a little attached with snapping turtle. I've got the fastest horse, the prettiest sister, the surest rifle and the ugliest dog in Texas. My father can lick any man in Kentucky... and I can lick my father. I can hug a bear too close for comfort and eat any man alive opposed to Andy Jackson."

 

Soon to be 67. Davy Crockett was huge. I even bought the dvd when it came out...Zorro was another childhood idol with a great theme song.

 

Need something new to watch a few years back and my kid had just read about Davy Crockett in school. So I dug out the old Disney Treasures edition in the tin. At first I go the "I don't wanna watch this". But by the end of the first episode, I had a hard time telling him we could only watch one a night for the week and that was it. So I had to go get the DVD two-fer, even though it was the same stuff (KotWF is edited, while River Pirates is basically both episodes complete). I think he's the only person under 50 that can sing all the words to the song! We even had to get a coonskin cap on a visit to Lake George at Fort William Henry (still haven't done Last of the Mohicans yet).

 

This is either the original song from Disney's 5-part series (Indian Fighter, Goes To Congress, At The Alamo, Keelboat Race, River Pirates) or very close to it from my memory (I was 4 years old when the first episode was made in 1954).

 

Phil Collins in his coonskin cap and showing off Davy's musket and hunting pouch that he donated to the Alamo