Gunsmoke

About Gunsmoke

Gunsmoke is the classic old time radio western, and here you can listen free online to the original CBS Radio show that ran from April 26, 1952, to June 18, 1961. William Conrad stars as Matt Dillon, United States Marshal in Dodge City, Kansas, in the cattle-town days of the 1870s. Parley Baer plays his deputy Chester, Howard McNear is Doc Adams and Georgia Ellis is Kitty Russell of the Long Branch. The channel plays the episodes around the clock in the order they first aired, and a free Gunsmoke podcast releases them in the same order.

Gunsmoke began when CBS chairman William S. Paley asked for "a Philip Marlowe of the Old West." Producer-director Norman Macdonnell and writer John Meston gave him a western for grown-ups instead of the kids' fare of The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid. Their Dodge City is hard and often sad: Dillon sometimes arrives too late, stories end on a somber note, and Macdonnell called his marshal "a lonely, sad, tragic man." Radio historian John Dunning wrote that Gunsmoke "is routinely placed among the best shows of any kind and any time."

Listen for the sound. Macdonnell told his sound men, Tom Hanley, Ray Kemper and Bill James, to take all the time they needed, so you hear every spur, saddle creak and door hinge, the honky-tonk piano at the Long Branch and the dog barking a block away. The radio show kept going six years after the TV version began in 1955, and many early TV episodes were adapted from these radio scripts. If you only know James Arness on television, this is where Matt Dillon started.

What you’ll hear

• William Conrad's Matt Dillon, who often narrates the story himself: "I'm that man, Matt Dillon, United States Marshal, the first man they look for and the last they want to meet."
• Chester Wesley Proudfoot (Parley Baer), Doc Adams (Howard McNear) and Kitty Russell (Georgia Ellis), years before TV's Dennis Weaver, Milburn Stone and Amanda Blake.
• Stories written mostly by John Meston that deal with lynchings, massacres, opium and frontier cruelty, and often end without a happy ending.
• Some of the best sound effects in radio: coconut-shell hoofbeats in a box of dirt and gravel, batwing doors and a jail door with rusty hinges.
• Rex Koury's theme music, "Old Trails," played by a small orchestra that included a pump organ.
• Hollywood's top radio actors in guest parts, among them John Dehner, Harry Bartell, Vic Perrin, Lawrence Dobkin, Virginia Gregg and Jeanette Nolan.

Where to start

• Start with "Billy the Kid" (1952), the first broadcast, then "The Cabin" (1952), in which Matt is snowed in with two killers; it was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2019.
• For Matt at his lowest, try "Bloody Hands" (1955), in which he gets sick of killing and quits his job. For Chester at his best, try "Never Pester Chester" (1952).
• Tune in to the live stream any time, or subscribe to the podcast, which releases a new episode every day in broadcast order. Plus members can play any episode now.

Gunsmoke on the radio

CBS Radio, 1952-1961. With William Conrad, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, Sam Edwards, Lawrence Dobkin, Virginia Gregg.

Where the recordings come from

The Gunsmoke recordings here come from the Old Time Radio Researchers' Gunsmoke Singles set (481 episodes), hosted by the Internet Archive. Our thanks to the Old Time Radio Researchers, the volunteers who found, dated and assembled the set, and to the Archive and the collectors whose uploads it rests on. 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 Gunsmoke episode: the full list, with air dates and stories

More to listen to

• Have Gun, Will Travel
• Frontier Gentleman
• Tales of the Texas Rangers
• The Six Shooter
• Fort Laramie
• Christmas on old-time radio
• New Year's Eve on old-time radio

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