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.