Biography

He was home on the Hollywood range only a few years but Bob "Tumbleweed" Baker (ne Stanley Leland Weed) still made his mark by the time he rode off into the sunset. Born on November 8, 1910, in Forest City, IA, his family eventually moved to Colorado and then to Arizona during his growing years. He enlisted in the Army when he was 18 and earned the nickname "Tumbleweed" while also learning how to play the guitar. He later served during WWII and the Korea War. Baker made an initial name for himself on radio. A chance audition for Universal Pictures, which was on the lookout to groom a new singing cowboy star after the meteoric success of Gene Autry, was his big break, beating out such other sagebrush hopefuls as Roy Rogers. Baker's first film, Courage of the West (1937), was a success and the new singing cowboy stud-in-town ventured on with such solid white-hatted vehicles as The Singing Outlaw (1937), The Last Stand (1938) and The Phantom Stage (1939). Astride his horse Apache, he ma

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Filmography