“They were made out of velvet, and then we had more of a drapery fringe on the bottom of the skirt.” They copied from movie cowboys “since there were no cowgirls at that time that I knew of.” Over several years, the outfits got flashier and flashier. There were real boots, fringed vests, white hats, big belts with millie and dolly spelled out in bright studs, and a gun and holster. The guns were real, too, “but they never had any bullets in them.” The costumes became famous not only at the Washington Boulevard headquarters of WLS, but also at the countless state fairs and small-town theaters where the WLS road show toured.
Dozens of records—at first for Victor’s Bluebird and later for the huge American Record Company—preserved the best songs from the Girls’ repertoire. There were genuine old cowboy ballads like “Old Chisholm Trail” and “Cowboy Jack” and Belle Starr’s “My Love Is a Rider,” but soon originals followed, written by the Girls or by a small cadre of women writers they knew, like Lucille Overstake.
These were songs like “Home Sweet Home in Texas” and “Lonely Cowgirl” and “I Want to Be a Real Cowboy Girl” and “Give Me a Straight-Shootin’ Cowboy”—songs that captured the sunsets and cactus of the West, but did so from a woman’s point of view. When the Bluebird A&R man complained about these original songs and insisted the older ones sold better, Millie and Dolly moved to a different label.
Their style remained the same whatever they sang: lilting guitar, achingly pure and close harmony, harmony yodels, and verses of high, wordless falsettos that sounded like a Hawaiian guitar. By the mid-1930s, both girls had married men from WLS’s music staff: Dolly to fiddler Tex Achison from the Prairie Ramblers and Millie to Bill McCluskey, an announcer and promoter. Toward the end of 1937, the Girls joined Red Foley and Lily May Ledford in a special program for Pinex Cough Syrup; it did so well that the sponsor moved them to Cincinnati.
Eventually this move led to both the Girls and Bill McCluskey relocating to WLW, which was just starting John Lair’s Renfro Valley Barn Dance. When Lair moved the program to Renfro Valley, Kentucky, the Goods stayed on at WLW, eventually joining the Boone County Jamboree. The Girls worked together until 1949, and then reunited in 1963 for a series of albums on the Texas-based Bluebonnet label. Dolly Good died about 1967, but Millie and Bill McCluskey still live in Cincinnati, with their friends, their scrapbooks, and a sense of accomplishment that comes only to true pioneers.
