How Do You Make a Western Songwriter?
How do you make a western songwriter? Darned if I know. Looking back it seems like as unlikely a career choice for me as any I could have dreamed up. I lived in the west as a kid, but haven't for almost 40 years. I can ride a horse and have dinked around with cattle and cowboys (thank you Ken Jones and Gary McMahan and Don Malone and Jim Patterson!) but I'm not much of a horseman and certainly no cowboy. I loved cowboy movies (especially Tex Ritter) and cowboy television shows (especially The Lone Ranger and Maverick) as a kid, but loved Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and Crusader Rabbit just as much.
But music, ah, music has always been a part of the fabric of my life. I've often said the first song I truly remember from the radio (I suppose it could have been a record) was Cool Water—the image of the old prospector and his mule, and the shimmering heat of the desert, and the teasing, taunting mirage were vivid and somehow horrifying, and the plangent, insistent call for water, water, cool water haunted me. Riders in the Sky came out in my youthful California years, and impressed me in the same way; nearly as a ghost story, vividly told. Green Grow the Lilacs is the other western song I remember from my earliest youth: my mother used to sing it to me a lot, if I recall. IN fact, she and her brothers Arvid and Hank used to sing together a lot, as kids, mostly the songs they heard on the National Barn Dance in Chicago, classic folk and country songs by people like Lulu Belle and Scotty, Patsy Montana, and the Prairie Ramblers.
They may have sung some after I was born but I don't recall it; I just recall music being an everyday part of growing up. Yet very little of it was western: those vivid examples aside, the music I recall absorbing as a kid was a mixture of show tunes (South Pacific in particular), light classics like Richard Rodgers' Victory At Sea, and the meatier classical composers. Occasionally some of the more melodic pop tunes of the early 1950s filtered through, usually those with a particular sweep of melody and idea, and incurable romantic, songs like Far Away Places, and Stranger in Paradise. I'm sure these all played a part, all shaped me somehow, prepared me for this unlikely career.
The dawn of rock broke over me as it did all the kids of my generation, though I found myself drawn again and again to the harmony groups: the Everly Brothers, the Chordettes, the Beach Boys, the Browns, and later when folk music swept the country I was attracted to Green Fields and Peter, Paul and Mary. Folk music was wonderfully accessible—my brother Jim and I quickly got ukes, then guitars, and began to play and sing. My brother, by the way, ended up with the lion's share of musical talent—these days he supports his passion for playing the cello with a part-time job as a radiologist. At any rate, it was guitars and harmony all through junior high and high school.
It's odd, in retrospect, that I didn't begin writing songs then; God knows I was singing enough of them! I won awards for poetry and creative writing, and played and sang a lot at home, and was in the glee club and the school musicals, but I never somehow put them together. I had a small gift for language, for putting sentences together in a pleasing manner, but being half-Scandinavian (Finnish, actually), I suppose I thought it was simply too presumptuous: I didn't want anybody to think I'd got the big head or anything, oh no. And besides, to be quite honest, a lot of things were far more important to me in high school, namely sports and my girlfriend.
College days at the University of Michigan got me into old-time country and bluegrass (forget sports; you don't think I could play football or track in the Big 10 Conference do you?) and bluegrass brought me to Nashville; then as now it was a town crawling with songwriters, yet I never considered myself one. I tried, of course, fitfully and rarely, but the results seemed trivial, inauthentic, and faintly embarrassing. Through a sheer stroke of luck I sang one of my earliest good original songs on a network TV special, Marjoe's Nashville (who remembers Marjoe?), but this exposure, and the bonus of what seemed like an awful lot of money at the time, didn't propel me headlong into a career as a songwriter. It seemed a happy fluke, a nice gift from the gods. Writing songs was not yet a calling.
If there was a turning point, it came in 1974, when I visited the first (and apparently last) Western Swing Festival that the irrepressible Guy Logsdon helped put on in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I loved western swing—and still do—and was surprised to find the Sons of the Pioneers on the bill. I recall thinking they were sure western, but didn't swing, and if anything I thought they were a little like a quaint relic, somewhat musty and faintly unhip.
-There were just four of them that day—the stripped down version in those lean years for western music—Lloyd Perryman, Roy Lanham, Dale Warren and Rusty Richards, and the minute they hit the stage with Way Out There, The Timber Trail, When Pay Day Rolls Around and the rest, I was blown out of my chair. I was stunned, nearly breathless; here, amid unrelenting barroom ballads and dance tunes was music of such freshness, such force, such...integrity. It appealed to me as a poet, as a musician, and it flung me back into the seat of the theater in Costa Mesa where I spent so many hours as a kid, where I lost my brand new Indian feather headdress the day I got it. What a torrent of memories.
I determined that day to learn all I could about the Pioneers and this style of music, and went back to the Country Music Foundation, where I was working at the time, and immersed myself in the songs of Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer, and the music of the classic Pioneers. I was aided and abetted by the walking encyclopedia of early country music, Bob Pinson, and I am forevermore grateful. I absorbed these songs like a sponge, and analyzed them as well, for by then I had some skills as a writer and a musician, and I could appreciate not only the stirring emotional appeal but the remarkable craftsmanship, both in lyrics and in music, that I found there.
I also found these writers were unfettered by the three and four chord mendacity of so many folk and country songs, and free of the desperate need for a commercial "hook" which made for the catchy but ephemeral hits of the day. These songs of the west were, like the west itself, adventurous musically and lyrically, and it was always an unexpected delight to find a vestige of Keats, for example, in Nolan's Waiting for the Sun to Say Good Morning.
In short, this was music that appealed to the head and the heart; I had at last found my métier, the true vehicle for expressing whatever creativity bubbled and churned within me. When Too Slim and Windy Bill Collins and I formed Riders in the Sky, it was just for fun, a platform from which to sing these classic songs in the classic style. After Woody joined us and it became clear this was going to become a real band and a real career, we knew we had to make our own mark in this style we loved. We did not aspire to become a museum piece, an example of living folklore, nor did we want to exists as a Sons of the pioneers imitation: after all, they had done this style as well as it could be done; as performers they had set impossible standards. We had to find our own way, within the tradition but separate and and distinct.
The most obvious way we've done that as a group, is, of course humor. But a more subtle way was to create our own body of material, songs that work within the tradition and we hope, add to it, but which are our own expressions. It was this need for songs with our own identity that set me (and Woody) into a songwriting frenzy; many of these songs were written in that first burst of energy as our Career begun: Blue Montana Skies, Riding Alone, Here Comes the Santa Fe and many others.
My early inspirations were, as ever cowboy songwriter and western music fan surely knows, Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer. Their songwriting was everything I wanted mine to be: direct, powerful, virile, poetic, tender and sometimes humorous. It is imaginative and unfettered by the traditions and constraints which generally typified the other songs, even western songs, of their era. They were poets and great melodists as well. I tried to see the world through the eyes of Bob Nolan, but I have to admit I learned more of songwriting from Tim Spencer; both were craftsmen with enormous heart, and shaped the music we now sing beyond calculation.
In addition I learned a lot—by spending endless hours with the songs—from two lesser known Western greats: Ray Whitely and Andy Parker. Their work is diverse and intelligent; Ray Whitley had a directness of communication I admire enormously; Andy Parker's best songs were all so different, and each was wonderful in a different way, and purely western.
A third tier would include Stan Jones, Foy Willing, Johnny Bond, Cindy Walker, and of course Marty Robbins, who has that wonderful narrative gift I don't, so few do. And I can't, in retrospect, underestimate the influence of those brilliant composers of the big band era. Those years I spent playing in the little Dixieland band at Shakey's, playing the popular songs of the 1920s through the 1950s had a profound effect too, on my guitar playing as well as my composing—there are echoes of dozens of big band era songs, both well known and obscure, throughout my work; in fact, a particularly beautiful or intriguing chord passage was often enough to spark the beginnings of a song. Filtered through my experience, and my love of the music of the west, this chord progression or that series of notes became a western song. In fact, I'm still trying to write a song based on the last few notes of the second line of the introduction to Stardust.
The songs have come more slowly since that first incredible burst of energy, but they have come steadily, and have gained some little stature in the western music community. It has been profoundly gratifying, I assure you, to have these little creations, these little children, grow up and go out in the world and thrive, be sung by others, make a little money. It has been a time of great reflection to go back and recall the composition of many of them; there are tender memories, joyful memories, sorrowful memories involved with many, and looking back over 20 years of songwriting is astonishing in itself. It reminds me deeply, somberly, of one of Bob Nolan's late tunes, That Old Outlaw Time.
In compiling a song book, the little introductions were important to me. I recall the delight in discovering the little stories behind some of the classic songs: how Tumbling Tumbleweeds was originally written as Tumbling Leaves; how Ray Whitley's casual remark to his wife upon getting a call to do a movie—”Well, honey, looks like I'm back in the saddle again’”—became the spark for one of the most popular western songs of all time; how Bob Nolan's haunting Song of the Bandit was inspired by Alfred Noyes' famous poem ‘“The Highwayman.” I promised myself if I was ever so lucky as to have my own song book published I'd tell the stories behind the songs, and here they are.
There are only 12 notes in the scale and a few thousand usable words; all of us presumptuous enough to write songs necessarily owe a lot to earlier songs, earlier writers. I've tried to give credit, when I can remember, to the author or song that inspired this phrase, that turn of melody, that set of chord changes. Sometimes the inspiration is obvious, when it's pointed out; sometimes it's so subtle I'm probably the only one who could hear it. Regardless, these are the best of the hundreds of western songs I've written, and their stories.
There is—and brother, this is a fact—not a lot of money to be made writing western songs. We who do it (and there are many fine writers out there today, more than ever really) do it because we love the style, because the wild integrity of the west and its music speak, for whatever reason, to our hearts. As I indicated back when I began this essay, I don't know why this music speaks so to me, but I do know that it does. These songs in the pages ahead are not only expressions of my own creativity; they are little prayers of gratitude, in a way, little thank yous to the men and women who inspired me and many others with their vision, their talent, and their love of the west.
Douglas B. Green, known professionally and affectionately as "Ranger Doug" of Riders in the Sky, has published many articles and books, including "Singing in the Saddle", 2002, and "Singing Cowboys plus CD", 2006. He has also published songbooks and a guitar instruction book, "Rhythm Guitar the Ranger Doug Way" with Suze Spencer Marshall, 2006.