Texan band sings of cowboy tradition

Texan band sings of cowboy tradition

By Paul W. Blair

JAKARTA (JP): "When I was going to high school in Sanford in
the Texas Panhandle oil country," says Red Steagall, "one radio
station you could hear in our town -- KDDD, broadcasting from
Dumas -- broadcast a one-hour country music show called
Tumbleweed Tempos every afternoon.

"This announcer was a real Western Swing fan and all he ever
played was records by Hank Thompson, Spade Cooley, Tex Williams,
Cliffy Stone and Bob Wills. In fact, I was about 25 years old
before I knew there was anything else in the world besides
buffalo grass, mesquite trees, barbed wire, Phillips 66 gasoline
and Bob Wills!"

If the American state of Texas were ever to dispatch its own
envoys to foreign republics, Steagall would no doubt make a good
one.

He and five fellow Texans are, in fact, fulfilling a similar
function this week as they tour several Indonesian cities
performing as The Coleman County Cowboys under the sponsorship of
the United States Information Service (USIS).

They began with a show last night in Medan. This evening,
they'll pack 'em in at the Hyatt Regency in Surabaya. There's a
Sunday evening performance at ITB in Bandung and one final
appearance Monday night at a by-invitation-only reception in
Jakarta.

Then they'll depart for Korea, the final leg of a whirlwind
five-nation tour that has already included concerts in Fiji, and
Papua New Guinea.

Though Steagall took a detour or two along the way (a college
degree in animal science and agronomy, followed by several years'
work with an agricultural chemicals firm), he's been involved in
music professionally since his mid-20s.

After working as a sales manager for a big farm chemicals
company "with all the future prospects I wanted," Steagall woke
up one morning "and decided that wasn't what I wanted to do for
the rest of my life, so I hitched a U-Haul trailer to the back of
my car and headed for California," where he worked in music
publishing for eight years.

"Meanwhile I was writing songs. Ray Charles recorded one of
them -- Here We Go Again -- in 1967 and that opened the door for
all the record producers to listen to the country songs I'd
written."

Eventually he moved to Nashville in 1973, recorded 13 albums
"and for years spent 250 days annually on a bus from one show to
another."

Cowboy poetry

Now Steagall's performance schedule is, by choice, far less
rigorous and he's concentrating on the two styles of music
closest to his heart.

"I have a nine-piece Western Swing band and we play about 60
shows a year. Then there's this smaller group -- three acoustic
guitars, a fiddle and a bass -- that does about 50 cowboy music
concerts a year.

Besides performing solo, taking part in cowboy poetry
conventions and playing at rodeo shows, Steagall has a syndicated
radio show called Red Steagall's Cowboy Corner on about 200
country music radio stations.

In the current Asian tour his group highlights the cowboy
tradition.

"When I was a kid, cowboys were my whole world. I never
daydreamed about owning a car when I grew up -- just a horse! I
used to sit around the campfire and listen to them sing songs
like Little Joe the Wrangler and Strawberry Roan ...

"And I was fascinated with the poetry ...You know, the real
beginning of western music was poetry, the rhyming narratives
that cowboys traded back and forth.

"The majority of the people who moved west and got involved in
the herding of livestock were of Celtic origin so eventually some
of their poems were set to Celtic-type melodies.

"For foreign audiences, we try to take extra time to explain
what the songs are about...

"Therefore, if you can't understand cowboy terminology and
cowboy slang, you just won't get the story of a particular
number. When I write cowboy songs, I'm not aiming for commercial
success. Instead, I write about things that are real to cowboys
who still work cattle on horseback for a living.

"For example, a line in one song says, 'We turned his string
out to pasture/'Cause he'll never use 'em no more/We buried him
on the hillside last Sunday/Another good cowboy's gone home.'

"So I try to explain what a cowboy's string of horses is and
what it means to turn them out to pasture after he quits or gets
fired or retires or dies.

Hollywood cowboys

"The movement of huge numbers of cattle along Western routes
like the Chisholm Trail was the largest migration of domestic
animals ever and it's really a tremendous saga -- an important
part of our history.

"This took place on a mammoth scale for only around two
decades, from about the late 1860's to the late 1880's. By then,
the national railroad network had expanded so much that long
cattle drives were no longer necessary to get cattle to the
railhead.

"But it's from that one period that today's notions of what
cowboys did and how they acted come from.

"Movies and TV elaborated on a few facts -- glamorized that
era, fictionalized it, sensationalized it -- until for most
people the cowboy life meant gunfights, stampedes, Indian attacks
and rowdy bars.

"The truth is that more cowboys were killed by drowning in
rivers they had to cross than all those other things put
together. Another fact often overlooked is that one-third of all
cowboys were Mexicans and one-fifth were black.

"Hollywood invented the image of the cowboy-with-a-guitar.
But they didn't carry guitars. If they had anything, it would
have been a fiddle, a banjo or a mouth-harp.

"However, the film-makers decided that the guitar looked like
a more romantic instrument. More stars could play it. And in the
movies, you could show a cowboy playing a guitar while riding a
horse!"

Are there still cowboys riding the Western range? "Thousands
of them!" beams Steagall. "Anyplace you have wide-open prairie or
brush, you need horses to work cattle and cowboys to ride them...

"There are a lot of cowboys in California." And there are also
a half-dozen real ones this week in Indonesia.