Autry Museum of the American West

This guide to the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles follows Gene Autry from a small-town Oklahoma telegraph office, where cowboy humorist Will Rogers urged him to trade the telegraph key for a guitar, to his rise as the Singing Cowboy and the decades he spent quietly amassing saddles, six-shooters, and film props from the West he played on screen. It sets that Hollywood-built mythology beside a harder, more complicated one now on view alongside it: Native nations, vaqueros, and homesteaders whose names rarely made the movies. Look for his own first Martin guitar among the cases.