My Heroes Were Cowboys

[Marsilius Boa]

Seventeenminutes later, she had "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys," a song that helped usher in country's "outlaw movement" when the legendary Waylon Jennings cut it as the lead track on the 1976 classic album "Wanted! The Outlaws."

But country music history wouldn't have been made if not for a case of mistaken identity. Vaughn told her "Cowboys" story to Bart Herbison, executive director of Nashville Songwriters Association International.

There was one in particular who used to break the yearlings for us. His name was Arley. He was this lanky, silent, non-communicative guy, but he'd ride round and round in circles. I'd sit on the fence with my feet tucked under the rail, and I'd say to myself, "Arley, please talk to me." He never said one word.

It kind of married between what I felt like was going on in Nashville at the time. People were starting to feel itchy about being stuck in a format. You could just feel it, because I was a session singer, and you learn more by osmosis, by being in these rooms than you realize. It was kind of like the outlaw mentality and my love for cowboys, which embodies that mentality, and I was just told to go home and write a cowboy song. And I did.

There was no such word as "outlaw movement" when I wrote "Heroes," so it was more of a feeling than a niche. ... It was kind of an odd thing. This was a serendipitous moment, and it's proof to songwriters that you have to have the nerve to stick your neck on the block, even if you are going to look stupid.

I had just recorded a song called "Back in the Country." I was a recording artist, and I had my 45. It was written by "W. Jennings and Troy Seals." So I decided, "Wouldn't it be great if I go by Waylon's office, since he wrote the song, and play him my record?

I went in there and said, "Mr. Jennings?" You shrink around Waylon Jennings because he was such a forceful and powerful personality. He was in this giant, black Naugahyde chair, and he took the record and played it and said, "That was nice, Sharon, but I didn't write it. That's Will Jennings." So, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, I said, "Well, while I'm here," and before he could say no, I ran out to my car, grabbed my reel-to-reel demo of me singing "Heroes," flung it across his desk and said, "I wrote this just for you," which I didn't.

He puts it on, and plays the first part of the first verse, and he stops it and whirls around in that big black chair and says, "Who wrote this song?" I said, "I did." He goes, "OK." He plays it up through the first chorus, and stops it, whirls around again: "Who wrote this song?" This went on about two or three more times, and finally, I'm getting a little hacked off. I said, "I wrote the song!"

He picks up the phone after playing it twice all the way through and calls Cowboy (Jack) Clement in Beaumont, Texas. He says, "Colonel, you'd better get in here tonight. We're cutting a song." And he cut the song that night. It wound up being (song) one, side one, on "Wanted! The Outlaws," which was the initiation of the outlaw movement.

In partnership with Nashville Songwriters Association International, each week we will release a new video interview with a Nashville songwriter about his or her work. Visit Tennessean.com/music to see an interview with Sharon Vaughn, as well as past videos in the series.

Cotton Rosser got his angel wings earlier this summer shortly before his 94th birthday. Neal had just celebrated his 96th birthday on June 26. Harry Vold was 93 at the time of his passing in 2017. These three men had so much in common, might have been adversaries a time or two, but they all lived their lives with an uncompromising sense of what was right or wrong and with longevity that few ever have the privilege of attaining. As rodeo stock contractors, their contributions to the sport that we love is unsurpassed and there will never be another group like them.

It has been my privilege and honor to have known all three of these men, to have shaken their hands, and been able to interview each of them. I only wish that the stories they are sharing in heaven could be shared with our earthly ears.

Neal Gay was one of those. Dodge trucks had started a bounty bull program that I was following for them. That took me to the famed Mesquite Championship Rodeo where their bull Dodge Durango earned a whopping $17,000 for Joe Wimberly in 1992.

Through the years, our paths crossed again and again and I always knew that beneath that tough exterior was a God-fearing, family-loving, rodeo-promoting gentleman that lived God-first, family-second, rodeo-third.

Neal came into the marriage as a widower with two sons, Pete and Donnie. Neal was in the used car business. There was an amateur rodeo every Saturday night in nearby Mesquite. Neal went there and had the idea of turning it into a professional rodeo. The property was for sale but needed a lot of work. Neal turned to his rodeo buddy Jim Shoulders, a deal was made and the Mesquite Championship Rodeo was born in 1958. Four years later the Gay family became complete with the birth of the third son, Jim.

There have been so many changes throughout the years, but it all started with Neal. And that weekly rodeo series gave many a young cowboy a start. But more than that, it brought attention to rodeo like had never been seen before. It was the first rodeo to be broadcast on television on a regular basis starting with ESPN and then moving to The Nashville Network. It made stars out of cowboys that would never make the NFR and gave Pam Minick, Don Gay, Shelly Burmeister, and Dan Miller opportunities to showcase their broadcasting skills.

Neal and the Rafter G Rodeo have produced the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo since 1979. He was a fixture in the traditional Grand Entry in the same building that friends and family gathered to remember him. He rarely missed a performance, even when he turned responsibility over to Jim. And, in 2020, he was there to see the rodeo move to Dickies Arena with facilities that were designed to put on a first-class rodeo.

I have always loved the old cowboy movies and television serials of yesteryear. My father loved horses and western movies too; and in my family, we always had a couple of riding horses to play cowboys on, a few of which would also pull a steady plow. My friends and I spent much of our idle time riding our horses in the piney woods, pastures, swamps and dirt roads of Nokomis, the rural Florida Panhandle community where I grew up. Anything I saw my cowboy heroes do on television, I went right out and tried on my own horse. I was skinny and limber in those days and totally unafraid of falling and getting hurt. This was important because most of the cowboy riding stunts I tried did not work out quite like they looked on television. Consequently, I took a lot of tumbles.

There was, however, one big thing missing from my boyhood cowboy fantasies. In the Florida Panhandle, we did not have the mountains, canyons and tumbleweeds we saw our western heroes riding in. Nevertheless, we were adventuresome boys with vivid imaginations and we simply pretended that the red clay gullies and sandy creek beds and small knolls available to us were the mountains and rocks we saw in the western movies we loved so much.

I never saw any real mountains until 1969, when my wife and I drove to San Francisco, Calif. to catch an airplane to Hawaii, where I was being transferred while serving in the Marines. We were in our early twenties then with one infant child. It was in the month of May when we started our drive west. The weather was warm and we were dressed in summer attire. We looked at our map and decided it would be exciting to take Colorado Highway 50 across the spectacular Monarch Pass. Halfway up the mountain, as we were oohing and aahing and taking pictures, it started snowing. Oh how excited we were! Neither of us had ever seen mountains or snow before. The snowfall quickly increased, the temperature suddenly dropped, and the roads turned icy.

My wife was driving and I promptly invoked my manly powers of superiority and insisted upon taking the wheel in these dangerous circumstances. My wife was more than happy to relinquish control and she stopped the car right in the middle of the road. As I stepped onto the icy road from the passenger side, I slipped and fell onto my back. At the same time the door slammed shut on my hand, smashing all my fingers. In this painful and nerve-racking state of mind, I took the wheel and we anxiously slipped and slid our way over the mountain at a speed of no more than ten miles per hour, even as experienced mountain drivers in 4-wheel-drive trucks flew around us without concern. When I came up behind a mountain plow, I stayed right behind it until we got to the bottom of that mountain. Despite the awesome beauty of the Rocky Mountains, I was never so happy to see the last of them!

I got a little better at mountain driving as the years rolled by, beginning with the mountains in Hawaii, then later in California, and vacationing occasionally in the Smokey Mountains of the Carolinas after returning home from military service. Later, my wife and I lived in Denver for a few years, and I even grew somewhat comfortable with the Big Kahuna of mountain ranges, the great Rockie Mountains. Mountain driving, however, always scared me, and second only to New York City cab drivers, driving on icy mountain roads is perhaps the scariest thing I have ever done.

I planned to travel to other places around the country to experience the beauty of the land and the charm of the people, but for the next few years I chose the comeliness of Ouray, Colorado to begin my new life. Despite the frequent droughts, mountain fires and hazy skies, the thin-air and splendor of the surrounding San Juan mountain range were a balm to my soul. The exhilarating arousal I felt in this little postcard rejuvenated mountain town waned in time and I returned to the familiar flatlands of Panhandle Florida and South Alabama. I left Ouray, Colorado in early January of 2008 in the middle of a snowstorm, slipping and sliding my way over the winding Red Mountain Pass toward Silverton and onward through New Mexico. I was well into Texas before I felt thawed out. No more mountain driving for this cowboy!

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