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 and became well known for his flamboyant style of campaigning, which included lots of singing, guitar strumming, and banjo playing. Taylor ran for the United States House of Representatives in 1938, and for Senate seats in 1940 and 1942. He became well known in Idaho for his mix of cowboy garb and country & western tunes. For example, Taylor sometimes campaigned on horseback, looking like a real-life singing cowboy and would also perform songs on the sound system of his campaign truck to draw crowds, like some strange combination of Gene Autry, Jefferson Smith from the movie Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and Woody Guthrie, with a little bit of Will Rogers thrown in. In contrast to such anti-Roosevelt figures in country music as Tex Ritter (who didn't go public with his politics until decades later), Taylor believed in and campaigned on expanding the New Deal and establishing a world government in the form of the United Nations. In 1944, the last election in which Franklin Roosevelt was a direct factor, Taylor won a United States Senate seat from Idaho by a margin of 4,000 votes, thus becoming the most left-leaning political figure ever to hold statewide office in that notoriously conservative western state (where U.S. postal workers are sometimes treated as foreign infiltrators). His major campaign song in that race, sung to the tune of "Home On The Range," had the opening line, "Oh give me a home in the Capitol dome . . . ." It might not have been a match for Woody Guthrie, but it worked to get him elected as "Idaho's Singing Cowboy." A flamboyant maverick, Taylor was an unrepentant New Dealer of the 1940s -- one of a relative handful, along with Claude Pepper of Florida -- who endured past Roosevelt's own time. A believer in workers' rights, civil rights, leftist economic theory, and peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union, he broke with President Truman over America's postwar policy of containing the Soviet Union and the rebuilding of Europe (which he believed was motivated by the need to create markets for American goods, rather than humanitarian grounds). Taylor wasn't so much an ideologue as a free-thinker, who genuinely believed that people, whether they were living in Stalin's Soviet Union or Harry Truman's U.S., wanted the same things out of life and had the same motivations (ignoring the fact, of course, that the people under Stalin had no voice whatsoever). In this regard, he was perhaps naive, but also closer to the thinking of many leftist musicians and union organizers than to too many country & western singers. The Republicans takeover of Congress two years after Taylor was elected cost him any chance he'd had of gaining influence in the Senate. In 1948, he joined former Vice President Henry Wallace as the vice presidential candidate for the left-leaning (some said outright Communist-influenced) Progressive Party, which polled over a million votes in that election opposing Truman, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, and Dixiecrat segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond. Taylor returned to the Senate, with the Democrats newly in the majority, but his vice presidential candidacy had destroyed whatever credibility he might've had within the Democratic Party. He finished out his term as a staunch advocate of workers' rights and an opponent of such legislation as the Taft-Hartley Act, and he introduced legislation to end the peacetime draft and put European recovery efforts in the hands of the United Nations. He tried to mend fences with the Democratic Party in his own state but he was too controversial; Time magazine in 1950 described him as "the banjo-twanging playboy of the Senate and an easy mark for far Left propaganda." Taylor was defeated by an anti-Communist Democrat in a primary in 1950, by a statewide margin of 949 votes. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1952 and 1956, defeated the second time in a primary by Frank Church, an anti-war Democrat who served for 24 years. Taylor went on to become a successful businessman in California, founding a company that manufactured wigs. Curiously, his name still crops up a half century after he left public life, through his music and his politics. He is remembered as the inspiration for several songs in the Bear Family Records box Songs For Political Action, and reactionary political writers -- the intellectual soulmates of the black helicopter crowd -- cite his writings in support of the United Nations from the 1940s as evidence of America's complicity in establishing a supposed one-world government. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide