Music From The Westerns Of John Wayne and John Ford

John Wayne and John Ford - a friendship and professional collaboration that spanned five decades which changed each other’s lives, changed the movies, and in the process, changed the way America saw itself.

An unfailingly evocative, dramatic use of popular themes has always characterized Ford’s soundtracks. The columns of cavalry, the wagon trains, the galloping riders move across the vast Western landscapes to tunes whose compulsive beat reinforces the zest, exhilaration, and spaciousness of the images. Dances and sing-songs are enjoyed for their own sakes. Moments of quiet feeling, of meditation, or of death are given special tenderness by the songs which softly accompany them. - Lindsay Anderson

Music from the Westerns of John Wayne and John Ford comprises original music themes and popular songs from seven classic Westerns that these giants of cinema made together. The set begins with Stagecoach, the film that is really the blueprint for all Westerns, that made an instant star of the young Wayne and in which Ford used the primal beauty of Monument Valley for the first time (A landscape that in cinematic terms Ford would make his own); through Ford’s famous Cavalry Trilogy (Fort Apache, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande), to the director’s Christmas fable in the Arizona desert, 3 Godfathers, to his painterly masterpiece The Searchers, which prompted Orson Welles to describe Ford as “the greatest poet cinema has given us”, and concluding with the director's only Civil War feature, The Horse Soldiers.

The historical significance of this edition should be noted; these are the original recordings, not modern re-recordings. All of the emphasis is on authenticity and on establishing the extraordinary atmosphere of the Old West that Wayne and Ford so intelligently, so thrillingly put up on the screen.