the outlaws, the lawmen, the cowboy, and, of course, the beauty and grandeur of the West. Western music is not limited to the American cowboy. In 1908, N. Howard "Jack" Thorp published the first book of Western music, titled Songs of the Cowboys. Containing only lyrics and no musical notation, the book was very popular west of the Mississippi River. Most of these cowboy songs are of unknown authorship, but among the best known is "Little Joe the Wrangler" written by Thorp himself. In 1910, John Lomax, in his book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, first gained national attention for Western music. His book contained some of the same songs as Thorp's book, though in variant versions (most had been collected before Thorp's book was published). Lomax's compilation included many musical scores. Lomax published a second collection in 1919 titled Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp. With the advent of radio and recording devices, the music found an audience previously ignored by music schools and Tin Pan Alley. Many Westerners preferred familiar music about themselves and their environment. The first successful cowboy band to tour the East was Otto Gray's Oklahoma Cowboys, put together by William McGinty, an Oklahoma pioneer and former Rough Rider. The band appeared on radio and toured the vaudeville circuit from 1924 through 1936. They recorded few songs, however, so are overlooked by many scholars of Western music. Various musicians recorded western songs in the 1920s and early 1930s, before the popularization of commercial singing cowboys, including Carl T. Sprague, John I. White, Jules Verne Allen, Harry McClintock, Tex Owens, and Wilf Carter alias Montana Slim. Many of these early western singers had grown up on ranches and farms or had experience working as cowboys. They typically performed simple arrangements with rustic vocal performances and a simple guitar or fiddle accompaniment. Mainstream popularity Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Western music became widely popular through the romanticization of the cowboy and idealized depictions of the west in Hollywood films. Singing cowboys, such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, sang cowboy songs in their films and became popular throughout the United States. Film producers began incorporating fully orchestrated four-part harmonies and sophisticated musical arrangements into their motion pictures. Bing Crosby, the most popular singer of that time, recorded numerous cowboy and Western songs and starred in the Western musical film Rhythm on the Range (1936).