Ian Tyson & cowboy music
GregoryaD
interest a few folks:
How the songwriter and singer Ian Tyson has remade cowboy music
by Jane and Michael Stern
(Please post any comments or messages regarding "Cowboyography" to the
"Arts & Culture" folder on our message boards.)
Ian Tyson came to Elko, Nevada, from his ranch in western Canada last
January to sing his cowboy songs and help other cowboys sing theirs. Elko,
between the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Shoshone Range, is a
wagon-train stop to which buckaroos have ridden for more than a century: a
place to shake off trail dust, whoop it up, and lament headstrong horses
and women. Tyson, who first made his name in the 1960s, as half of the
popular folk-singing duo Ian and Sylvia, flew down to be part of this
year's annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Elko is cold in January, but the
gathering takes place in the dead of winter for a good reason: it is the
only time some poets can leave their cattle. The fall roundups are over,
and spring calving season has not yet begun.
The doings in Elko are a bonanza for men and women from all over the West
who yearn to say something about their lives. The Western Folklife Center,
based in Elko, sponsors the gathering, which includes seminars and
workshops with titles like "Cowboy Code," "In Praise of the Horse,"
"History: When Indians Became Cowboys," "Ranch Remedies," and "Swapping
Stories," along with sessions (called "Take Your Turn") at which anyone is
welcome to express whatever is in his or her heart. Spontaneous
recitations take place all over town. There may yet exist some taciturn
wranglers of the Gary Cooper type, but not one of them comes to Elko. For
the duration of the gathering, moments of silence scarcely exist among
these prolix plainsmen, many of whom spend much of the year alone with an
audience of cows. Instead of pistols they pack Sonys in belt holsters, so
that they can record flashes of their own inspiration or good words said
by others.
At 6:00 A.M. in the coffee shop of the Stockmen's Motor Hotel, as we slice
into gravy-smothered chicken-fried steaks, two lanky cowpunchers stroll
past looking for a booth, talking in rhyme. In the rifle store downtown
one shopper checks the iron sights of a lever-action 30-06 Winchester
while his buddy recites a sonnet he wrote about a desperado stranded in
the hills and running out of ammunition. From the boisterous communal
tables of the Basque dinner halls on Silver Street to casual gatherings in
motel rooms all over town, cowboys declaim their poems, sing their songs,
and spin their yarns.
Ian Tyson is scheduled to star in a concert Wednesday night, and before
that, on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, he will lead a workshop in
songwriting. The Folklife Center limited enrollment to thirty people, and
the class is full. In this crowd Ian Tyson is a living god at the summit
of his creative power. To write a song with him in 1995 is like what it
might have been to riff with Charlie Parker in 1950 or Elvis in 1956 or
Bob Dylan in 1965.
Tyson remade the rules of cowboy music--absorbed everything that went
before him and then created something that contains the past but sounds
wholly new. Almost single-handedly he revived interest in a song form that
had been dormant, if not dead, for at least three decades. His 1986 album,
Cowboyography, was the watershed. It includes original songs about lost
love and lyrical landscapes in the West, and about cowboy idols from the
turn-of-the-century western artist Charles M. Russell to the fugitive
survivalist Claude Dallas, who became a folk hero in the early 1980s after
shooting two Idaho game wardens. Tyson often jokes that he recorded the
album "for the seven hundred working cowboys in North America." It has
sold more than 100,000 copies--not a monster hit by Madonna's standards,
but big enough to start cultural observers thinking about a "cowboy
renaissance."
Fresh as Ian Tyson's music sounds, in one way he is doing now just what he
did in the 1960s: giving new life to a vintage form of musical expression.
Thirty years ago many of the tunes he and Sylvia Fricker sang were ancient
Scotch-Irish ballads, such as "Nova Scotia Farewell" and "Come All Ye Fair
and Tender Ladies." Today his repertoire contains his own rearrangements
of many of the classic cowboy songs, such as "Whoopee Ti-Yi-Yo," "Leavin'
Cheyenne," and "Colorado Trail."
For him it has been a logical progression. The old songs of America's
cattle country, Tyson points out, were based on traditional Scotch-Irish
ballads; with an infusion of frontier wit, Mexican vaquero lingo, and the
rhythms of freed black slaves who joined the cattle drives north, the Old
World strains became cowboy folk songs. Writing in his recently published
autobiography, I Never Sold My Saddle, about the kind of music heard at
the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, Tyson observed, "Elko is more folk music than
anything I ever did when I was a folkie. It's real folk music."
The development of Ian Tyson's new identity as a leading voice of cowboy
culture (as opposed to his earlier one as a folkie) coincides with the
evolution of the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering. "I am a product of Elko in
terms of my American following," Tyson wrote. People at the gathering were
eager to hear his songs about the West, for he is an artist who seems
truly to be one of their own kind. Indeed, writing cowboy music comes
naturally to Tyson. Born and raised in the Canadian West, he grew up with
horses, and like many youngsters who read books by the seminal western
mythmaker Will James (himself originally a Canadian), he dreamed of riding
the wild and windy slopes that James described so seductively. He recalls
that even in the hootenanny days of the 1960s it was Sylvia who wanted to
sing "Captain Woodstock's Courtship"; he preferred "Texas Rangers." When
the popularity of folk music waned, Tyson used his songwriting royalties
to buy a ranch in Alberta. By 1980 he was performing what he calls
"drinking music" at a bar in Calgary called the Ranchman's, but he was
more interested in the cattle and the cutting horses he raised at the
T-Bar-Y than in writing songs and making records.
Then a wondrous thing happened. As Tyson describes it, a new kind of music
simply began to flow from life on the ranch, and he started to write about
good horses and cowboy ways, about Will James and the Goodnight-Loving
Trail, about the beauty of the northern lights or a hawk on the wing.
"It's like it was preordained," he wrote in his autobiography, "like I was
selected by something, somebody to do this."
Tyson found himself in a state that creative artists seek all their lives:
doing work that felt exactly right. Of his first cowboy album, Old Corrals
and Sagebrush, which was released in 1983, he observed, "It seemed like it
was recording us toward the end, rather than us recording it." By the time
he performed at the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering, in 1985, he was a
musician with a mythic vision, a distinctive voice, and a repertoire that
described the West in ways no one had heard before. In the ensuing years
the gathering has mushroomed from a few hundred loquacious cowpokes to
10,000 people, and Tyson has recorded four more albums of western-theme
songs, earning Canadian Country Music Association awards for best album
(Cowboyography) and best single ("Navajo Rug," written with Tom Russell).
Tyson has done more than put new life in sounds from the frontier's past.
He has been a compelling writer since the start of his career (his
best-known early compositions are "Someday Soon," which gave Judy Collins
a major hit in 1969, and "Four Strong Winds"), and his output of original
songs about life in wide-open spaces is prodigious. Some of his lyrics
retell familiar cow-country fables: "Murder Steer" is about a yearling
bull branded with the word MURDER after a Texan was shot dead trying to
claim it, and "Casey Tibbs" is about the greatest rodeo bronc rider ever.
Many Tyson compositions are wistful elegies, such as "M.C. Horses," about
the auctioning and dispersal of a once-great remuda of ranch horses, and
"Jaquima to Freno" (written with Blaine McIntyre), about the passing of
the old vaquero skills. He has written mournful ballads about men who
choose the cowboy life and then look back with a troubled mixture of joy
and regret on what that choice has meant. The chorus of "I Outgrew the
Wagon," which he wrote with Ross Knox, bemoans the hardships of the range,
but the last verse says, "Don't misunderstand me / There were lots of good
times too / I would not trade a single memory / . . . Yeah we was wild as
the broncs we rode / And the days stretched endlessly." And he has written
songs that are as exhilarating as a fast gallop on a high plateau, among
them "Horsethief Moon," a whirling Mexican polka about the love of a
cowboy for a cowgirl whose "braids are like bronc reins, they shine in the
sun."
Despite Tyson's success, cowboy culture is still very much a subculture,
and his popularity has been limited in the United States by the fact that
his music gets so little airplay. Instead of clever pop lyrics, as in the
country-western hit "Too Much Week at the End of the Money," Tyson leans
toward what he has called "knife and whore songs" and western gothics. His
melodies are often written in the very nonpop (but classically western)
musical styles of the waltz, the shuffle, and the polka. Nor does Tyson
fit the mold of platinum-record Nashville "hat acts" like Garth Brooks and
Dwight Yoakam, who wear showy cowboy duds and put on concerts as gaudy as
any rock star's. His fans are all eager to point out that Mr. Tyson is not
country-western. He is unhyphenated western, without a jot of rhinestone
frills about him. He is, after all, a working rancher. His business cards,
which he keeps tucked inside the sweatband of his cowboy hat, list not
only his address and phone and fax numbers but also the brand of his
ranch, the name of his stud horse, and the names of his stud's sire and
dam. The cowboy singer Mike Beck tells of the time Tyson asked him to come
along on a concert tour. Beck imagined traveling in a deluxe musician's
tour bus; instead they pulled a stock trailer so that Tyson could pick up
some horses and cattle along the way.
Ian Tyson's songwriting workshop takes place in a big meeting room at the
Elks Club, on Idaho Street. Among the thirty participants are three women,
one storytelling Crow Indian cowboy, and a lumberjack from Alaska who
wants to write songs about his love for wood. Most have brought a guitar
or a harmonica. Only a few of the men do not wear tall-crowned hats and
high-heeled boots; many sport wide waxed moustaches and rodeo-trophy
buckles on their belts. Even those who do not tend cows for a living
adhere to the cowboy's code of courtly ways and trail manners: they open
doors for ladies and stand up to shake hands when they meet men; any time
you encounter one, indoors or out, he will tip his Stetson, look you
square in the eye, and offer a cordial salutation.
When Tyson walks into the room at nine o'clock, carrying his guitar and a
briefcase, a wide-brimmed black hat thrown back on his head, conversation
stops. This is politeness; it is also awe. And it is his charisma. At age
sixty-one, Tyson is head-turning handsome in a purely cowboy way: tall and
lean, with a rugged face etched by wind and sun and a fair amount of
whiskey. There is an easygoing smile in his eyes, but as he pans the room,
his gaze is rock steady: it is a look that calms a skittish horse and lets
people know he's in charge. His hands are tough and strong, but he uses
them meticulously--they are a horseman's hands. His voice is remarkable:
deep, relaxed, and comforting, with a sorrowful bass resonance that is as
smooth and sweet as clover honey.
"I cannot teach you how to write a song," Tyson begins. "I am sorry, but
it cannot be done. What I can do is help you with the mechanics, the pure
craft of it. I've been doing that for thirty years, and I've been able to
afford to ranch cows because of it." He strums his guitar to demonstrate
what he calls "the absolute fundamental no matter what you are doing"--the
metronomic four-four time signature of so much popular rock-and-roll and
country music today. "If you want to be a songwriter and sell your songs,
you have to learn it," he says. "I practice four-four an hour a day in my
cabin, and nothing is going to slow me down or speed me up. You absolutely
need four-four. Imagine if I had written 'Someday Soon' as a shuffle." He
changes rhythm and plays it as a polka. "'Get out of here! You're fired!'"
He tries it in three-four time, as a waltz. "Sounds kind of dumb, doesn't
it?" But then he strums "Faded Love," the classic Bob Wills Texas shuffle,
the way it was written, with a pronounced backbeat. It sounds just right.
"This is the soul of old country music," he says, riding Wills's lilting
rhythm as if it were an easy-loping cow pony. He then switches "Faded
Love" to a more symmetrical four-four time and surprises himself. "Not
bad, not bad," he says, listening to his guitar. "But not authentic."
As he strums and hums his own and others' compositions to make his points
about time-signature technique, many participants in the workshop seem to
forget that they are here to work and learn. It is mesmerizing to listen
to him go from the wavy one-two-three, one-two-three of "Tennessee Waltz"
to the driving straight-eight surge of Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" to
the eerie strains he wrote (with Tom Russell) in a minor key to tell the
legend of the outlaw Claude Dallas.
Tyson's advice is practical. "If you are going to write a gunfighter song
or a murder ballad, you go into the minor keys," he says, and then he
sings the opening chorus of "Claude Dallas" a cappella:
In a land the Spanish once had called the Northern Mystery
Where rivers run and disappear
And the Mustang still lives free
By the Devil's wash and the coyote hole
In the wild Owyee Range
Somewhere in the sage tonight
The wind calls out his name
Aye Aye Aye
"That song is in a minor scale," he says, "but you need to kick the
sucker, so you go up into the majors to lift the mood. When you want to
shoot someone, you go back into the minors. It's good to keep a song at a
high trot and then break it into a lope from time to time. That raises it
up, and it soars."
Although some people came to the workshop with their own compositions in
hopes of getting them critiqued, Tyson has other plans. "I'm going to have
you collaborate," he says. "I love collaborating. If you've got a good,
stimulating partner, you can write a song in a day. That's fun. It's a lot
more fun than my old way of torturing myself up in the hills doing a slow
waltz in a minor key until you want to commit suicide." He says he won't
restrict the rhythm but wants everyone to stick to the same theme. He asks
for suggestions.
"What about a song about the prairie creating a song?" suggests Tom
Zachry, forty-nine, who hails from the small town of Dayton, Nevada, near
Carson City, where he is a "schoolmarm"--his word--who teaches third
grade. His guitar case is emblazoned with a bumper sticker that says Trust
Everybody But Brand Your Calves, and his briefcase has one that says I'M
THE N.R.A.
"Good idea," Tyson says to Zachry. "Very Bob Nolan [author of 'Tumbling
Tumbleweeds']. It's a good theme--been around since western music has been
around. It's about the love of the land, isn't it? But you'll have to
stretch it out to get thirty-two bars."
Stephan Blanchard, thirty-five, born in the South Bronx but now a citizen
of Oregon, and outfitted all in denim with a battered slouch hat, a red
silk neckerchief, and pointy red cowboy boots, suggests "voices of the
sage"--about a cowboy listening to the prairie and trying to choose
between a woman and cowboying.
"Good," Tyson says. "I'll put you and Tom together."
Finally a theme for the whole room is chosen--the changing West of the
1990s--and the class is divided into five groups. "Work on this. Really
try hard," Tyson tells everyone before each group finds its own place to
write. "I want to see your entrails on the table tomorrow morning."
As reporters with no musical ability, we had planned merely to observe the
goings-on, but Tyson will have none of that. He puts us with Tom Zachry,
Stephan Blanchard, and a forty-three-year-old trick-roping poet and
veterinary anesthesiologist (large and small animals) from Hawaii named
Gene Stowell. We five move to a big ballroom with elk heads mounted on the
wall along with burnt-wood plaques that say FIDELITY, BROTHERHOOD, and
JUSTICE, and an American flag under glass that once flew above the Capitol
in Washington, D.C. We put some folding chairs in a circle, and just to
get acquainted, each of the three musicians performs one of his own
compositions. Zachry sings "Ranges and Changes," Blanchard sings "Just a
Cowboy," and Stowell recites a poem of his that Western Horseman published
last year, "If This Old Tack Could Talk." Each of the works has an elegiac
mood and conveys the sense of loss that has been at the heart of western
art since trail herders sang their requiem for old ways, "The Campfire Has
Gone Out."
Guitars across their knees, the three aspiring songwriters begin to toss
out lines and chords, and soon a verse about a cowboy at a lonely campfire
starts to take shape. "This collaboration stuff is amazing," Zachry says,
as Tyson strolls past and listens to the emerging song with an encouraging
nod of approval. "God, we're good." Zachry laughs when the verse is
infused with ghostly imagery and a woeful musical line is developed. "I'm
starting to cry," he says. "If I can make myself cry, we must be doing
just fine."
For two hours we write and rewrite, drifting into bull sessions to escape
the pressure of the creative process--swapping jokes and tall tales,
reciting poems, strumming melodies, debating the virtues and vices of
Appaloosa horses--and then charging back at the song. At one point the
lyrics go off in a totally wrong direction and wind up at a dead end. Gene
Stowell breaks the disheartened silence: "Let's just saddle another horse
and get back to work." By midday we've got it: two verses and a chorus, in
slow-waltz time. The next morning, when we meet at nine, Tom Zachry comes
in with a third verse that he wrote overnight, saying he felt that the
lyrics needed to be more specific. A title is chosen, fine-tuning is done,
Zachry develops a melancholy part for his harmonica, and at 10:30 the song
is ready to be performed.
"I am not going to critique these songs," Tyson says before the groups
present what they have written. "I am going to give you my impulse
reaction, nothing intellectual, just the way I feel." His analysis is
tough. "The chorus has exceptional changes and lifts the song
immediately," he tells one group. "But your verses have a rather ordinary
quality." About a song with lyrics that tell of the wolves to be released
in Yellowstone Park, he cautions, "Yellowstone cannot be in a minor chord.
It is a great national park. You just can't bum people out about it." He
warns another group, "You have so many strong images, but the chorus
doesn't change enough. It's too much like the verse melody. You've got to
punch it, make that song take wing!" When he has trouble hearing a singer,
he says, "Whatever you do, enunciate. If you Emmy Lou those choruses
[referring to the way the singer Emmy Lou Harris sometimes swallows her
words], all your good writing will be lost." After all five songs are
sung, Tyson says, "We've got an album here!" He is being mighty generous,
but we leave the workshop fantasizing about how we will divide up royalty
checks.
That night Ian Tyson performs some of his own songs for an overflow crowd
at the big modern auditorium in the Elko Convention Center. For the
workshop students the performance is a humbling experience. By comparison
with the songs we wrote, the majesty of his work is all the more stunning.
For those who love Tyson's music, there is something magical about his way
with notes and words. After two days of teaching technique and time
signatures, Tyson had concluded his workshop with a story about that magic
and about some things that cannot be taught. He told how his album
Cowboyography became his breakthrough, artistically as well as
commercially, thanks not only to a producer who made all the right moves
but also to a gift he received: he woke up one night in his cabin to the
sound of a chinook (a warm spring wind), and the songs were simply there.
"Something was going on, something beyond my control," he said. "It was
like the gods of music came down and said to me, 'It's yours.' It was a
gift. I had the craft to get it all down. You need the craft to receive
the inspiration. That is all you can do as a songwriter: find the gift and
say what is in your heart. The world may not be interested. If it is, you
are lucky. And if you can write one great song in your life, you are
blessed."
--------------------
Jane and Michael Stern are the authors of numerous books, including Way
Out West (1993) and, with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Happy Trails: Our
Life Story (1994).
"Cowboyography"
Copyright 1995, The Atlantic Monthly.
atcowboy
Rudi Schmid
Bear Family Records, Postfach 1154, D-27727 Hambergen, GERMANY
announces a new autobiography by Ian Tyson, as follows:
Ian Tyson (with Colin Escott), _I never sold my saddle,_ #0020 006, DM
69.00 (1 DM = US$.72 currently),
112 pages, 28.5x22.5 cm, hardbound, with many color and B&W pics, words and
music to a few songs, and discography.
Does anyone have the publisher (Canadian?), Canadian/US price, ISBN, and
date (1994?) for this? Thanks.
--Rudi Schmid, Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley (sch...@garnet.berkeley.edu)
Barrie McCombs
Library had the information which was requested. This is from their
on-line catalogue.
SOURCE
- 30 APR 95
- Calgary Public Library
AUTHOR
- Tyson, Ian, 1933-
TITLE
- Ian Tyson : with Colin Escott.
- I Never Sold My Saddle
PUBLISHER
- Douglas & McIntyre, 1994.
DESCRIPT
- 112 p. : ill., music.
SUBJECT(S)
1) Tyson, Ian, 1933-
2) Country musicians -- Canada -- Biography.
NOTE(S)
1) Includes music (melodies with chord symbols and guitar
tablature) for 11 of Tyson's songs (p. 84-110)
2) Discography: p. 111-112.
ISBN
- 1550541781
You've got me interested. I will have to check the book out and read it.
- Barrie
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| Barrie McCombs, MD, CCFP | Family Physician by day |
| bmcc...@acs.ucalgary.ca | Folk Musician during full moons |
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LHazelton
Glenn Ohrlin.
Barrie McCombs
: Why is there so little mention in this forum of cowboy music. I'm a fan of
: Glenn Ohrlin.
Probably because most of the discussion is in rec.music.country.and.western.
- Barrie
OldFrat
$22.95. Some people seem to like it, but I was disappointed. it reads
like a long magazine article as opposed to a book and doesn't go into much
detail about his life or the motivations/inspirations for his songs.
There are only about 40 pages of text, the rrest being pictures, song
lyrics, and the music for 10 songs. I've been a major league fan of Ian's
for 32 years now, and this is the first time he has disappointed me!