Stuart Hamblen: the singing country cowboy who ran for president
Everybody wants to rule the world, and the figures of the entertainment industry are no exception.
Whether it is Ronald Reagan exchanging a fledgling film career to become the leader of the free world, or Bez taking a break from his Happy Mondays day job in a bid to become an MP. Still, country star Stuart Hamblen remains one of the strangest cases of an entertainer turned political candidate.
Hamblen entered the world of country music with a big advantage over most other country stars. Namely, the Texas-born singer was an actual cowboy, having spent his childhood roping cattle and working on rodeos, already elevating himself above the legions of pretenders donning cowboy hats and strumming acoustic guitars with all the conviction of two children in a trenchcoat trying to buy a cinema ticket.
So, at the age of 18, Hamblen pursued a career in country music, armed with his childhood experiences on the farms and ranches of the ‘Lone Star State’.
After becoming the first-ever ‘singing cowboy’ on American radio during the 1920s, Hamblen moved west, establishing himself on Californian radio via his ‘Country Joe’ persona, which eventually earned him a recording deal with Decca in 1934 – the first artist to be signed to the American leg of the record company, bizarrely enough. To say that Hamblen was one of the shining stars of American country music back in the 1930s, then, would be an understatement, but leading a life of musical excess doesn’t come without its difficulties.
In a tale as old as the entertainment industry itself, Hamblen soon found it difficult to deal with an endless onslaught of pressure and expectations, and began to self-medicate with copious, debilitating volumes of alcohol and a serious gambling problem to boot. Inevitably, these self-destructive habits landed the singing cowboy in jail on numerous occasions, but luckily, he brought in enough money through his radio work that his sponsors saw fit to bail him out each and every time.
It wouldn’t take a Nostradamus to predict the end of Hamblen had he continued down that path – the entertainment industry had a history littered with the dead bodies of alcoholics and gamblers. However, the country star found solace and redemption in an evangelist preacher named Billy Graham, who convinced Hamblen to give up his drinking and gambling habits and convert to Christianity. In doing so, this spelt the end of his radio career, but it also formed the origin story of his political career.
After being sacked by his sponsors for refusing to air an advertisement for beer, he started the much more pious radio show, Cowboy Church of the Air, which caught the attention of the Prohibition Party. Although America’s period of prohibition had officially ended in 1933, there were still a lot of people out there braying for the outlawing of alcohol – apparently ignorant of the fact that, even during the period of prohibition, alcohol had still persisted, and this reformed version of Hamblen was among them.
Needing a high-profile name to add credence to their cause, the Prohibition Party elected Hamblen as their official presidential candidate for the 1952 presidential election. Of course, the election was eventually won by Dwight D Eisenhower, but Hamblen did amass an impressive 72,949 popular votes, making him the most successful Prohibition Party candidate in history up to that point.
America seemingly wasn’t ready for a singing cowboy to occupy the White House (or, indeed, to give up their alcohol), but Hamblen persisted with his temperance-based activism and God-honouring musical material right up to his twilight years in the late 1970s.
Rather than destroying himself with his previous addictions, he ended up living to the age of 80 before passing away in 1989, putting an end to one of the most intriguing and unexpected radio careers in American history.
