Stuart Hamblen (far right) in King Of The Cowboys (1943), also known as Starlight On The Trail. That's rodeo champ Yakima Canutt behind him.
[From song]
I was wandering way up in the mountains and came across this dilapidated cabin." He was hunting in the high Sierras and had noticed a mangy, starving old hound dog hanging around an otherwise abandoned cabin. "Inside, I found an old prospector lying dead. I saw curtains, so that meant a woman had been there. I saw kids' things lyin' around. And they were all gone now. The old man was alone." Most of us would just get out, some perhaps would go to the cops, but Hamblen sat down and, with the corpse lying next to him for inspiration, began to rough out a song. "It took about 30 minutes," he said. "I put it down on a brown paper bag the old fellow had left lying there:
Ain't a-gonna need this house no longer Ain't a-gonna need this house no more Ain't got time to fix the shingles Ain't got time to fix the floor Ain't got time to oil the hinges Or to mend no window pane Ain't-a-gonna need this house no longer I'm a-gettin' ready to meet the saints.
[. . .]
A quarter-century after he himself met the saints and a century after his birth, "This Ole House" remains the versatile Stuart Hamblen's most enduring legacy - and the only Number One hit written in the presence of a dead body.
http://www.steynonline.com/
This Ole House Steyn's Song of the Week
by Stuart Hamblen November 16, 2014
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