Fess Parker: His ship came in.
Born on a mountain-top in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free…
–The Ballad of Davy Crockett
The height of the craze was in 1954, after which we are told it tapered off (https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/the-davy-crockett-craze). But you couldn’t prove it be me!
With the fad supposedly over, and me eight or nine years old, it still had scads of momentum. Here are some of the “merch” items that I gave my parents no peace until I owned them:
Davy Crockett marionette, Davy Crockett T-shirts, Sunday color comics, comic books, Davy Crockett plastic figures, Davy Crockett record albums, Davy Crockett moccasins…
Walt Disney had ignited a major cultural movement without intending to. He cried all the way to the bank.
Star Fess Parker got tons of mileage out of his coonskin persona.
Yeesh! If it was this intense in 1957, when I was old enough to get blown away by it, what must it have been like in the middle of 1955? (“Everything was Davy Crockett,” says my wife.
My husband, 5 years older than me, remembers the craze a lot better. He tells me stories about his adventures in the woods near his house. He had a coonskin cap (actually real) and everything else Davy Crockett that he could get his hands on.
I’ll bet he didn’t have a marionette.
No marionette, but he would’ve if he could’ve!
Coming along a bit later, I remember Davy Crockett being a thing in the early ‘60s. This was before the schools taught that everything in the US was only evil, and we admired these pioneers, who helped shape our nation.
We need heroes, not anti-heroes. It’s almost impossible to imagine what life was like back then. They didn’t have interstate highways and were grateful to have even a modest trail to follow. There wasn’t a Love’s or some other travel stop; they lived off the land and what little they could carry. These people were something that is very rare in today’s world. He’s still a hero, in my book.
The more we study him, the better he turns out to be.
Davy Crockett a childhood hero for sure. He served several terms in Congress and died a hero’s death at the Alamo. We need more heroes like him today instead of the anti-heroes Hollywood throws at us (but I am good at dodging them).