This may be considered an addendum to the topic of who co-starred with Duke the most. I was trying to think of how many John Wayne movies featured co-stars who were singers. I came up with 10:

Dark Command- Roy Rogers

Spoilers
Pittsburgh
Seven Sinners- all with Marlene Dietrich

Rio Bravo- Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson

The Alamo- Frankie Avalon

Sons of Katie Elder- Dean Martin

Cast a Giant Shadow- Frank Sinatra

True Grit- Glen Campbell

Big Jake- Bobby Vinton

Did I miss any? Now, a case COULD be made for some actors who were part time singers or former singers, like Walter Brennan or Ken Curtis, but I went with actors known for their singing careers.

Add North To Alaska to that list. Fabian had a part in that one. dukefan1

Add Dorothy Lamour from Donovan's Reef.
Paul Anka, Tommy Sands and again Fabian from The Longest Day (yet they weren't in the same scenes with JW)
You might want to add Robert Mitchum (they cut his song scene from El Dorado), he was regarded as quite a good singer (I have one of his records - they were right!)
Regular co-star Chill Wills did some recording also.

Well Roland

I was bound to ask you this but have you any more info on the song scene in El Dorado, have you seen it and how do you come by all this information?

B)

Hi Robbie
the song scene was actually filmed because stills from the scene exist. A good way to find out about these things is to also read the books about the directors, and there are a lot of fine books out there about Howard Hawks (first, try "Hawks on Hawks", that's an extended interview, next could be "Howard Hawks, storyteller", and Robin Wood's book "Howard Hawks", it's quoted a lot). Sometimes it's interesting to read a shooting script to see that so many things get changed while filming is underway, lines thrown off or given to another character. If I remember right Hawks cut the song scene because his own son told him "Aw, Dad - a singing sheriff?" In composition - that's the way the stills indicate, anyway - it would have been the same thing like the song scene in Rio Bravo and the piano scene in Hatari all over again: JW looking on from a distance while the group is enjoying themselves. Hawks used to improvise a lot, that's how the crutch thing came about. When they realised that Mitchum indeed wore it under the wrong arm in a couple of scenes they just added the line where Wayne tells him so! Oh, one more trivia about Rio Bravo/El Dorado: Did you know that the scene in El Dorado - Caan "diving under those horses" - was originally in the Rio Bravo script and filmed with Ricky Nelson (again, there's a still existing)? They cut that one because Hawks felt they already had killed enough of the baddies, so he used that idea in El Dorado. What he kept where the shots of the riders falling off their horses.

Yo Roland

Do you have any idea if the footage of this still exists and if so how/where to locate it.

B)

Hi Robbie
if this footage really still exists it's probably damned to wander between the winds forever. If you look at the effort and the time the pour into restoring a film - meaning: they have to look for negatives all over the world - frankly, I've given up hope that they come up with little treasures like that. I've never heard of the El Dorado footage. However, I've heard tall talk from a guy in Germany who claims he has 35mm cut footage from Rio Bravo. To my knowledge there are no special features like that on the DVD, so I don't know. But then, I was lucky enough to find me the original featurette of "Hatari" on 35mm, and that's really rare. Haven't seen it elsewhere and it's not even mentioned in any book I know. And it's not on the DVD, either. So I guess those people who are in charge and actually hold the rights on these films don't really care about stuff like that (they know we buy the DVD in any case - extras or no extras - it's our own fault!). What I'm trying to tell you is: it might just be that some footage has survived. If so, it might just pop up some day. That'll be the day!

Hello Roland

Yet again you have supplied excellent information I would love to see the extended version of Rio Bravo wow that would be brillaint, is there any way of getting hold of the person who has this material to get him/her to release it as I am sure many John Wayne fans would love to see it. I once see a clip of John Wayne directing a scene from Rio Lobo but Im sure that many people have saw this clip but my main point is if footage like this has been kept Im convinced that deleted scenes from his movies also have to be about somewhere its just a matter of locating them!!!!

B)

I couldn't decide where to post this, but overall I found the article interesting, and the brief mention of John Wayne didn't hurt either (he's mentioned in the ninth paragraph, the one that begins with "1952").

Certainly John Wayne was not known for his singing talent :rolleyes: .

Anyway, here is a commentary (http://www.heralddemocrat.com/articles/2006/03/12/commentary/commentary02.txt) from the Herald Democrat, which seems to originate in Texas.

Mrs. C :angel1:

Howdy Mrs. C!
Pretty good article. I enjoyed reading it. For those who might be interested, I have pasted below an article I wrote for a book I've been writing about John Wayne (for about the last ten years! Who knows, maybe I'll even finish it!). It's still in rough draft form, so please excuse the grammer and punctuation mistakes. Apparently Ol' Duke did sing in some of his pictures. Below is the info I've managed to round up. So for what it's worth, here it is. Please don't be too critical, I have a fragile ego ya know. I'm just a tender sensitive ar-teest. Just kidding!
Colorado Bob
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There are some who say that John Wayne had a beautiful baritone singing voice, and there are those who might argue with them. But Duke would, when the occasion called for it, let loose in song. Once, during a celebrity auction, where participants bid to purchase the talents and time of various celebrities in order to benefit charity, an anonymous bidder put up one thousand dollars to hear John Wayne sing The Shadow of Your Smile. Duke tried in vain to avoid the “honor,” but after the bidding rose to five thousand dollars, he took the stage and warbled out the familiar tune.
In 1933, the “Singing Cowboy” was born with the Lone Star film, Riders of Destiny, wherein Wayne portrayed undercover agent “Singing Sandy Saunders”, the very first of Hollywood’s singing cowboys. There was one problem, however, with Wayne’s singing abilities. He apparently did not have any. Therefore his singing voice had to be dubbed in by an off screen performer.
Over the years, many alleged experts have claimed that Wayne’s voice was dubbed by either early western singer Smith Ballew or by Glenn Strange (who was best known as Sam the bartender on television’s Gunsmoke).
However, according to those who were there on the sets of those early Wayne westerns, most notably producer, Paul Malvern; director, Robert North Bradbury; his son, early western star Bob Steele; and screen writer Lindsley Parsons; Smith Ballew never dubbed John Wayne’s singing voice. In fact, Ballew himself confirmed that he had never dubbed Wayne’s singing.
Both Bob Steele, his father, Robert North Bradbury and Lindsley Parsons, Sr. have all stated that it was Bradbury’s other son, Bill Bradbury, who provided the singing for John Wayne in his earliest singing roles.
When one listens to Wayne sing in those early films, it is easy to hear at least two different voices in these films. In some films the voice is of a higher pitch and in some a lower pitch. Bill Bradbury sang with a higher tenor, and therefore could not have dubbed with the lower voice. Did Glenn Strange provide that lower voice? Although Strange did appear in several of Wayne’s early westerns, the answer is no. During one of Wayne’s many interviews, he was asked who had provided his voice in the later Lone Star films. His answer was, “Pappy Kirk (actor-singer Jack Kirk) dubbed me in a lot of the latter Lone Star and Republic westerns.”
Wayne hated the idea of being billed as a singing cowboy, and eventually went to producer Nat Levine and told him that he could no longer pretend to be singing. It bothered him when he went on publicity tours and fans would ask him to sing, and he would have to make up some story to avoid exposing the fact that someone had to dub his voice. Although Levine was reluctant to lose his new found “singing cowboy” gimmick, he did listen to Wayne’s solution to this dilemma. Wayne knew of a radio cowboy singer that Levine could use to make his singing cowboy westerns. Levine listened to the young singer and was impressed. He brought him to Hollywood, signed him to a contract, and a legend was born. That young fairly unknown singing cowboy who later became a Hollywood legend was none other than Gene Autry.
Some years later, Wayne recalled with some humor his early role as Singing Sandy, when he related on the Dean Martin Show, “During the early days I wasn’t known just as a fighter and a gunslinger. I was once known as Singing Sandy. It was back in the 30’s and I was playing a cowboy, and the director thought it might be a good idea if every time I got mad I’d start to hum. Well it caught on and the next picture I did four songs and played a guitar. Well, I’ll have to confess, there was three of us. There was me, there was the fellow that dubbed my voice, and there was the fellow playing the guitar. I was really a trio!”
Those of us today don’t have to put up thousands of dollars to hear Duke sing, as some of his films contain both the apparent (dubbed by others) and actual singing voice of John Wayne. The films which featured a singing John Wayne are as follows:

-“Riders of Destiny” (1933) = “The Outlaw’s Fate (The Cowboy’s Song of the Dead),” = (dubbed by Bill Bradbury, son of the film’s producer/director, Robert N. Bradbury)

-“Man From Utah” (1934) = “Blow Desert Wind (Song of the Wild)”, (dubbed by Bill Bradbury)

-“Westward, Ho!” (1935) = “The Girl I Love In My Dreams” (dubbed by Jack Kirk who appeared in the film)

- “Lawless Range” (1935) = “The Outlaw’s Fate (The Cowboy’s Song of the Dead)”, and, “On the Banks of the Sunny San Juan” = (dubbed by Jack Kirk who appeared in the film)

-“Pittsburgh” (1942) = “(Darling) Clementine” (sung by Wayne himself)

-“In Old Oklahoma” (1943) = “Redwing” (sung by Wayne himself)

-“Three Godfathers” (1948) = “Cowboy’s Lament” (“Streets of Laredo”) (sung by Wayne himself)

-“The Fighting Kentuckian” (1949) = “600 Miles More To Go” (sung by Wayne himself in a duet with Oliver Hardy!)

-“Roy Rogers & Dale Evans” (1950’s) = During the 1950’s, John Wayne appeared in a short musical film with Roy and Dale, where Wayne was featured singing around the campfire

-“The Quiet Man” (1952) = “The Wild Colonial Boy” (sung by Wayne himself in a duet with Victor McLaglan)

-“The Commancheros” (1961) = “Redwing” (sung by Wayne himself)

-“Donovan’s Reef” (1963) = “The Monkeys Have No Tails In Zamboanga”, and, “Frere Jacques” (sung by Wayne himself)

- 1963, Unknown Newsreel : SHARE benefit party held at the Moulin Rouge in Hollywood, features various celebrities performing onstage, including John Wayne with James Garner, Jack Lemmon, Tony Franciosa, Vince Edwards, and Paul Newman. Wayne is singing.

-“Big Jake” (1971) = “The Dirty Cow” song (sung in Spanish, this is only an approximation of the songs title, as this is what Wayne is singing about)

-“Cahill, U.S. Marshall” (1973) = “Cowboy’s Lament” (“Streets of Laredo”) (sung by Wayne himself)

- “Rooster Cogburn” (1975) = “I Finded Her!” (sung by Wayne while his character is in a state of intoxication)

-“The Shootist” (1976) = “Titwillow” (sung by Wayne himself)