Glen Taylor

A handful of country music stars have made careers in politics. Most of them made those careers in the deep south and were political figures on the right. The two-term governor of Louisiana, Jimmie Davis, was the most prominent, but Jimmy Swan and Tex Ritter both stood for elective office. In addition, a handful of office holders have also possessed some fair musical talent: Senators Robert Byrd and Albert W. Gore Sr. both played the fiddle. And then there was Glen Taylor, "Idaho's Singing Cowboy," who combined music and politics, and was the sole leftwinger among this elite group of politician-performers. Although he was never a "star" as a musician, his music made him well known locally in Idaho, Montana, and Nevada. More than a musician or a politician, Taylor was the link between activist songs and action. As a left-leaning Democratic Senator from Idaho and the vice presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential election, Taylor represented the politics that performers such as the Almanac Singers and the Weavers were espousing in their songs in the middle and late '40s. Glen Hearst Taylor was the son of a minister, born in Portland, OR and raised on a farm in Kooskia, ID. He quit school in the eighth grade to earn a living, working as a sheepherder and sheet-metal worker's apprentice before he discovered performing. He joined a succession of travelling theatrical stock companies, initially as an actor and then as a singer and musician. His baritone voice seemed ideally suited to cowboy songs. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, he sought to understand its causes and began studying leftist politics and ideology, gravitating toward liberal political philosophies. He tried to organize farmer-labor political parties in Montana and Nevada...