Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to like in BL Classics. This classic article from November 1976 connects Baylor’s Roxy Grove Theater – named after the music school’s first chair – to New York’s Roxy Theatre through the tune by composer David Guion, “Home on the Range.”
David Guion’s name has not been a household word in this generation. Many people are uncertain whether it is pronounced Ghee-on or Guy-on (the latter is correct). But almost everyone knows the song with which that name is associated – “Home on the Range.”
Except for a year in Illinois, Guion studied music in Texas until 1912. In that year, at age nineteen, he went to Vienna to study Leopold Godowsky, a concert pianist who was head of the Vienna Royal Conservatory of Music. Guion’s dream of concert-hall fame was shattered when he was forced to return home in 1914 by the outbreak of World War I.
Disappointed but not defeated, Guion found employment in Texas colleges, and he tried his hand at composition. Writing in the idioms of the Negro spiritual and the western folk song, he arranged pieces he had known as a child and created original works in those styles. Some of them attracted the attention of music publishers in New York, and by 1918 he had manuscripts accepted by two large firms, one of which offered him an exclusive contract.
Teaching and a limited recognition in the concert world were not enough, so in 1930 Guion decided to try his luck in New York City. He arranged an audition with the music director of the Roxy Theater and was immediately thereafter awarded a contract for a week-ling appearance. Each showing of the film at that theater was preceded by a lavish and lengthy stage show. Guion was given a sixteen-minute segment on the show for his Prairie Echoes, made up entirely of his music. Guion was the star, supported by several well-known singers, the Roxy Symphony Orchestra, the Roxy Male Chorus, and the Roxyettes, a group of thirty-two dancing girls. The exposure at the Roxy brought contracts with NBC Radio, several individual radio stations, and an awareness of the man and his music across the nation.
Among his tunes that were widely heard after the 1930 success, it was “Home on the Range” that caught the public’s ear. By 1934 it was the most popular tune on the air, but its performances were stopped by legal action. Guion, NBC, and several publishers were jointly sued for half a million dollars, accused of infringement of copyright. The plaintiff argued that Guion had used material composed in 1905 as the basis for his arrangement. The court ruled that all versions of the song were in public domain. Guion’s version, containing new music for the third stanza and therefore unique, regained its position on the airwaves; and its acceptance by the public continued after the short interruption. Guion’s association with the song reached high places: in 1936 President Franklin D. Roosevelt phoned him and called him “Mr. Home-on-the-Range”; in 1972 a Chinese band in Peking played the piece during a formal banquet while President Richard Nixon and Premier Chou En Lai exchanged toasts.
David Guion’s association with Baylor University came only in recent years. He had already deposited some of his manuscripts and printed music in two libraries of his native state – about seventy-five items in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Texas in Austin, and twenty-three manuscripts in the Dallas Public Library Music Manuscript Collection. Early in the 1970s he sought a suitable depository for his remaining materials, and he eventually chose Baylor. Box after box of material arrived, all of it destined for storage and identification in the Crouch Music Library. Some of it provided the background for a master’s thesis in music, “David Guion and the Guion Collection,” by Shirley McCullough, M.Mus., 1975.
Guion’s gift to Baylor defies complete sorting and cataloguing. It is the accumulation of personal treasures from a lifetime of activity. Boxes of studio photographs and snapshots, scrapbooks, files, and piles of clippings, contracts, business and personal letters, manuscripts of his unpublished memoirs and his story about Mlle. Stinky, a favorite dog. In addition, there are manuscript copies of music, arrangements and published editions of many of his pieces, and recordings of his works. The file of cards under “Guion, David” in the Music Library is more than two inches thick – and that represents only what is catalogued at this time.
Baylor responded eagerly to Guion’s proposal to deposit his treasures in Waco. Dean Daniel Sternberg presented some of Guion’s works on several occasions with the Baylor Symphony Orchestra and the Waco Symphony. A concert of Guion’s songs was given on June 25, 1972, in Roxy Grove Hall, with the composer present as the honored guest. But it was the second song recital that stands out in memory. On July 8, 1973, the concert, again in Roxy Grove Hall, featured not only Guion’s music, but the composer as accompanist, playing the piano for the entire program as School of Music faculty performed his favorite pieces.
It was fitting that the final selection on that occasion was a performance of “Home on the Range,” the song that Guion had introduced to New York at the Roxy Theater. This time it was “Home on the Range” in Roxy Grove Hall at Baylor. Guion was again on the stage – and the audience was on its feet, applauding the cowboy composer.
