Frontier Gentleman

About Frontier Gentleman

Frontier Gentleman is an old time radio western from CBS, broadcast from February 2 to November 16, 1958, and you can listen to it free online here, around the clock or as a podcast. John Dehner stars as J. B. Kendall, an Englishman and former British Army officer who roams the American West reporting for The Times of London, carrying a gun as well as a notebook. Each show opens with a trumpet theme and the promise of "an Englishman's account of life and death in the West."

Antony Ellis created the show, produced and directed it, and wrote nearly every episode. An Englishman himself, he was married to Georgia Ellis, radio's Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke, and he had written for Gunsmoke, Suspense and Escape. Radio historian John Dunning called Frontier Gentleman "a solid cut above" most westerns on radio or TV and "a lovely piece of radio," adding, "it was Anthony Ellis's show." The music came from Wilbur Hatch and a young Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote the trumpet theme and later won an Oscar for The Omen.

Kendall is nearly always short of money and travels by stagecoach and riverboat from Montana Territory through Wyoming, Dakota, Kansas and Missouri. Along the way he meets real people of the frontier, including Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Jesse James, as well as made-up drifters, gamblers and outlaws. It ran only one season, near the end of network radio drama, but it was recorded on tape, so every episode survives in excellent sound. It is a short, complete series you can hear from beginning to end.

What you’ll hear

• John Dehner as Kendall, the year before he became radio's Paladin on Have Gun, Will Travel.
• Real Western history worked into the stories: Hickok's last poker game in Deadwood, Custer's Last Stand, the case of Crow Dog.
• Jeanne Bates as Belle Siddons, the gambling lady, the show's only recurring character besides Kendall.
• Kendall's own account of the West, from learning that "hucky-dummy" is raisin bread in Cheyenne to riding a 300-mile horse race.
• Hollywood's best radio actors, including Virginia Gregg, Jeanette Nolan, Harry Bartell, Lawrence Dobkin, Joseph Kearns and Jack Kruschen.
• The original commercials for Kent cigarettes, Studebaker and Tums on later broadcasts.

Where to start

• Start at the beginning: "Shelton Brothers" (1958) puts Kendall in South Sunday, a Montana Territory town where carrying a gun is against the law.
• "Aces and Eights" (1958) sits Kendall at Wild Bill Hickok's card table in Deadwood, and "Kendall's Last Stand" (1958) takes place as Custer meets his end.
• Save "Random Notes" (1958), the last episode, for last: Kendall heads home on a train, looking back on his months in the West.
• Listen live any time, or follow the podcast, which releases a new episode every week in broadcast order.

Frontier Gentleman on the radio

CBS Radio, 1958. With John Dehner, Virginia Gregg, Joseph Kearns, Stacy Harris.

Where the recordings come from

The Frontier Gentleman recordings here come from the Internet Archive item FrontierGentlemanHQ (42 episodes) on the Internet Archive. Our thanks to the uploader and the collectors behind it, and to the Archive for keeping it. The sound is our remaster of those files (rumble, hiss and hum cleaned out, levelled to steady broadcast loudness); the recordings themselves are theirs. About our sources.

Every Frontier Gentleman episode: the full list, with air dates and stories

More to listen to

• Gunsmoke
• Have Gun, Will Travel
• Tales of the Texas Rangers
• The Six Shooter
• Fort Laramie

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