Folk song ‘Home on the Range’ now being made into movie

It’s a movie that just might be every Kansas baby boomer’s dream come true.

Think of some featured actors from “Gunsmoke,” “Daniel Boone” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Then throw in some tunes from Kansas and Michael Martin Murphey.

Mix well with mystery, intrigue and a bit of homespun Kansas values, and you’ve got “Home on the Range,” a made-for-TV movie that will premiere at theaters in Wichita, Kansas City and Smith Center in November. It is still too early to say for sure where it will be shown.

“It’s been the dream of people for a long time,” said Ken Spurgeon, the movie’s producer and director. “I wrote the script and tried to go beyond saying this was the story of the cabin. It’s more than that.”

It’s the story of how “Home on the Range” became one of the world’s best-known folk songs. How it sprang up on the Kansas prairie and quickly made its way along cattle trails to cow towns, gaining national popularity with the advent of radio. The story also includes some angst in how it was nearly stolen from Kansas, was prohibited from being played and how it took an NBC attorney from New York City to track down its true history.

“The hook is the lawsuit of 1934 and how a couple from Arizona sued 30 entities, including NBC and Bing Crosby,” Spurgeon said. “In the movie, each of the characters tell the story.”

Currently, the 50-minute movie – with a cast of 25 actors – is being filmed in and around Wichita. Scenes have been shot at Old Cowtown Museum, the old Sedgwick County Courthouse and at some private locations in Sedgwick County, as well as at the historic cabin where the song was written in 1872 by Brewster Higley in Smith County.

Some of the actors include Ron Howard’s dad, Rance Howard. Rance Howard has played character roles in a number of television shows, including “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Seinfeld” and “Gentle Ben.” In “Home on the Range,” he portrays an 86-year-old Cal Harlan, a Smith County Kansan who sings the song from memory just as Higley had originally written it.

Samuel Moanfeldt, an investigative lawyer for NBC and the publishing houses, is portrayed by Newman University theater director Mark Mannette.

Darby Hinton, who in the 1960s portrayed Daniel Boone’s son in the television show about the famed frontiersman, plays a bartender named Albert Freidlich in San Antonio’s Buckhorn Tavern. It was in 1910, when Freidlich was working at the bar, that the song “Home on the Range” was published for the first time by John Lomax, a Texas college professor researching folk music of the Old West.

“Gunsmoke’s” Buck Taylor, who played Deputy Newly O’Brien from 1967 to 1975, plays Trube Reese in the movie. In 1875, Higley was treating a patient for a gunshot wound while another man waited – Trube Reese of Smith Center. Reese began thumbing through Higley’s books and came upon the poem.

In the 1930s, Moanfeldt interviewed an elderly Reese, who told him about the origins of the song.

Woven throughout the movie are renditions of the song performed by groups such as Kansas and Murphey.

The movie will wrap up filming this week, said Spurgeon, a Kansas historian and longtime film producer.

“ ‘Home on the Range’ is the anthem of the West; it is a song that transcended time,” said Spurgeon. “It is the folk song that survived when many did not, and it resonates because everybody can relate to it. Brewster Higley’s poem was a prayer and a wish. He had a rough life and was finally finding a home. This is where it all started.”

This story was originally published August 14, 2016 at 6:37 PM with the headline "Folk song ‘Home on the Range’ now being made into movie."