Frank Luther

by Steve KurutzOne of the first urban cowboys, Frank Luther made a career out of supplying urban listeners with their fix of traditional country music. A Kansas native, Luther was a professionally trained pianist who played in several vocal groups in his home state before moving to New York in 1928 and meeting fellow Kansas transplant Carson Robinson. The duo wrote and recorded several songs targeted at urbanites and regularly guested on a country radio program hosted by Ethel Park Richardson. When Luther met and married a fiddler who had once played with Robinson named Zora Lyman, he began to move away from country music, preferring to write and perform children's music.