Clint Eastwood, Singer

Many of you may have seen the (in)famous movie Paint Your Wagon from 1969. If you haven't it's a classic that I've written about occasionally for more than twenty years. There's a lot to love about that movie, which I've covered in the past. One thing people do not love, except insofar as they enjoy mocking them, is the musical numbers sung by Clint Eastwood.

There a number of roughly sung songs in the piece -- e.g., Lee Marvin has a growlingly effective voice, but not a beautiful one -- so mostly these get shrugged off as just a thing you have to get through to get to the good parts. There are also some great songs, including some that Eastwood participated in during the movie. Still, it always struck me as hilariously out of character for anyone to have cast Eastwood in a singing role for a Hollywood musical. 

What I did not realize was that Clint Eastwood had a singing career both before and after those unfortunate contributions. He had a Western album before that movie came out built around his character from Rawhide. He became a songwriter as well, and composed a number of the songs in his later films. In fact he turns out to be a good musician, well trained in the piano and also the bass guitar. 

According to the story told under the 'singing career' link, Eastwood developed a love of country and Western music when he went to a Bob Wills concert as a youth. It has come up from the beginning towards quite late in his career. Even if his singing was never his very best quality, the Western album from his youth is serviceable; and his musical contributions to his art, excepting the singing, have been significant. 

I owe the gentleman an apology. He had talents I never suspected in addition to the clear ones about which the whole world knows.