When Gene Autry married Ina Mae Spivey in St. Louis on April 1, 1932, many of their friends laughed and assumed the young singer was pulling an April Fools’ joke.

When Gene Autry married Ina Mae Spivey in St. Louis on April 1, 1932, many of their friends laughed and assumed the young singer was pulling an April Fools’ joke. At the time, Autry was still years away from becoming America’s Singing Cowboy. He was performing on local radio for modest pay, having met Ina Mae through her uncle, Jimmy Long, the early mentor and recording partner who helped guide Autry’s first steps in the music business. The young couple had very little money when they took their vows in Missouri, so the quiet ceremony looked to outsiders like a lighthearted stunt. Within a few years, Hollywood changed their lives completely. Autry stepped in front of the cameras and became a national phenomenon, spending decades moving between movie sets, recording studios, and packed rodeo arenas. Through all the years when millions of fans followed the man on horseback, Ina Mae preferred to stay out of the spotlight. She protected their home life from the noise of the film industry and stood beside him through every major shift in his career, from his enlistment in the military during World War II to his later ventures in broadcasting and Major League Baseball as owner of the California Angels. Neither the lean years of the Great Depression nor the pressures of Hollywood stardom ever broke what they built in 1932. Their marriage lasted 48 years until Ina Mae passed away in May 1980, ending a lifelong promise with the woman who had loved him long before the cameras ever rolled.

At the time, Autry was still years away from becoming America’s Singing Cowboy. He was performing on local radio for modest pay, having met Ina Mae through her uncle, Jimmy Long, the early mentor and recording partner who helped guide Autry’s first steps in the music business. The young couple had very little money when they took their vows in Missouri, so the quiet ceremony looked to outsiders like a lighthearted stunt. Within a few years, Hollywood changed their lives completely. Autry stepped in front of the cameras and became a national phenomenon, spending decades moving between movie sets, recording studios, and packed rodeo arenas. Through all the years when millions of fans followed the man on horseback, Ina Mae preferred to stay out of the spotlight. She protected their home life from the noise of the film industry and stood beside him through every major shift in his career, from his enlistment in the military during World War II to his later ventures in broadcasting and Major League Baseball as owner of the California Angels. Neither the lean years of the Great Depression nor the pressures of Hollywood stardom ever broke what they built in 1932. Their marriage lasted 48 years until Ina Mae passed away in May 1980, ending a lifelong promise with the woman who had loved him long before the cameras ever rolled.

The first time Gene Autry walked into the Springfield, Missouri parlor of his musical partner Jimmy Long and met Long’s niece, Ina Mae Spivey, he told her aunt and uncle right then that she was the woman he wanted to marry.

That meeting came through a bond forged years earlier along the Frisco Railroad in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, where a young Autry worked as a relief telegrapher and Long served as a senior dispatcher. Long invited the younger man home for supper, harmonized with him on guitar, and co-wrote the sentimental ballad “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine”. The two recorded the song as a duet in late 1931, giving Autry the first major hit of his career just as he settled into a regular spot on Chicago’s WLS National Barn Dance.

Ina Mae understood both railroad work and music long before Autry stopped in Springfield on his way to Chicago. Born on April 19, 1911, in Francis, Oklahoma, she was the daughter of a Rock Island Railway telegrapher. After playing forward on the basketball team and singing in the glee club at Duncan High School, she worked at a local Western Union office to save tuition money before moving in with Jimmy and Jessie Long to study music education at the State Teachers College in Springfield.

For the next three months, Autry found excuses to visit the Longs’ parlor between radio broadcasts for Sears and evening shows in small Midwestern towns. In the spring of 1932, he was booked to perform in St. Louis with Jimmy Long, and Jessie and Ina Mae traveled in the next day to meet them.

The young couple slipped away that afternoon after promising to rejoin the older pair for supper. When the four sat down at the dinner table that night, Autry and Ina Mae announced they had gotten married hours earlier. Because the date was April 1, 1932, both the Longs and friends back in Chicago initially laughed off the news as an April Fools’ prank.

Their modest life in Chicago shifted rapidly two years later when producer Nat Levine brought Autry to Hollywood, leading to the 1935 serial The Phantom Empire and a starring contract with Republic Pictures. Over the next two decades, Autry appeared in nearly 100 films, launched his weekly Melody Ranch radio show in 1940, and drew packed crowds on exhausting rodeo and concert tours.

While millions of moviegoers watched the Singing Cowboy on horseback, Ina Mae stayed away from industry publicity and managed their residences in the San Fernando Valley and Palm Springs. When Autry enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1942 and served as a C-109 transport pilot flying supplies over the Himalayas in the China-Burma-India theater, she kept their affairs steady at home until he returned from military service.

Her background as a music student also shaped the biggest recording of his life in 1949. Songwriter Johnny Marks sent over a holiday demo titled “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and Autry Initially dismissed the tune, doubting it suited his style.

Ina Mae heard the demo differently, telling her husband that the story reminded her of the Ugly Duckling and that children would love it. At her urging, he recorded the song during the final minutes of a Columbia studio session in Hollywood, turning a track he nearly passed over into a multi-million-selling classic that topped the pop charts that Christmas.

As western films gave way to television in the 1950s and 1960s, Ina Mae stood beside him while he built Golden West Broadcasters, purchased hotels, and became the founding owner of Major League Baseball’s California Angels in 1961. Although the couple never had children, they remained close companions across nearly five decades of travel, baseball seasons, and quiet winters in the desert.

Their 48-year marriage lasted until Ina Mae passed away on May 19, 1980, at age 69. Long before the movie cameras, the broadcast empire, or the five stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Singing Cowboy’s greatest fortune had started in a railroad dispatcher’s parlor with a former Western Union clerk who knew which songs were worth keeping.

Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Gene Autry – Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Audio)