By Bob Welch
Music plays a curious role in our lives. We use it to fill idle hours, yet it also inspires us. Lyrics enter our heads in certain specific situations. Warming by the stove on a winter morning might evoke Jimi Hendrix. On a road trip it might be Eddie Rabbit.
Music conjures memories and experiences that transcend everyday circumstances and cause a pondering of the deeper questions in life. While riding horseback the music selection narrows and almost always includes Ian Tyson. For cowboys his songs resonate. Why? How does he pull it all together? Where does the inspiration come from?
With a rare chance to visit with Tyson prior to a show, I discovered his fans owe a debt of gratitude to horses—more specifically broncs—and that Tyson’s time adrift has been as important as his prolific and successful periods. Tyson’s music from the beginning has been inspired, motivated by and informed by horses and heartaches. I also discovered that Johnny Cash was always there.
Tyson steadfastly refuses to talk about the heartaches. That’s fair. That he shares what he does in his songs is a generous gift. Besides, the horses are interesting enough.
Aimless Wandering
While I don’t remember the first time I heard an Ian Tyson song, I remember the first time thinking about an Ian Tyson song. The “Old Corrals and Sagebrush” album was released in 1983, and Tyson’s rendition of the traditional cowboy tune “Sierra Peaks” was puzzling to me as a boy. And what is a “reata man?”
There’s no telling how many times I listened to the 18 songs on that album. Growing up, driving to horse shows and cow works across the Rocky Mountain West, the entertainment was either mom reading “Hank the Cowdog” books or whatever cassette tapes dad had rolling around the truck—usually Ian Tyson or Jerry Jeff Walker.
Later I was thumbing through a friend’s record collection and discovered Ian & Sylvia’s “Four Strong Winds.” Was that really Ian Tyson? Where was his hat? And his horse? My friend told me Tyson was a folk singer before he was a cowboy.
Sylvia Fricker and Ian Tyson, 1960s.
As it turned out, that wasn’t exactly true. He was a wannabe cowboy before he was a folk singer before he became a real cowboy before becoming a cowboy musician.
Tyson’s father, an English immigrant, had an infatuation with cowboys and the West, and he came across Canada looking for the objects of his infatuation. He was frozen out in the harsh winter of 1906–07 and ended up settling outside of Vancouver. The fascination never left, though, and he always kept horses and made Will James’ books his favorite gift for his young son. Ian taught himself to ride in a crude way on those horses, and he inherited his father’s weakness for horseflesh.
Tyson worked one summer as a packer in the Canadian Rockies, but he wandered somewhat aimlessly after he left home. He went to art school and worked in logging camps and restaurants while simultaneously riding bareback horses at the amateur and local rodeos.
In 1956 at 22 years old, Ian was bucked off a bronc and hit the dirt just as the horse stepped on and shattered his ankle. That was the first time a horse altered the course of Tyson’s life, but it wouldn’t be the last. Lying in a hospital bed, he heard Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.” That was his first experience with Cash—but again, not his last. He borrowed a guitar from the patient next to him and spent his convalescence teaching himself to play.
Clean Start, Clean Slate
Tyson found his voice and future wife, Sylvia Fricker, in Toronto. They formed a duo, moved to New York and ran in the same circles as Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; Dave Van Ronk and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In the 1960s they hit it big with songs like “Four Strong Winds” and “Someday Soon.” They also appeared on the “Johnny Cash Show” at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Once again the lives of Tyson and Cash intertwined, but it wouldn’t be the last time.
The British Invasion was fast approaching and eventually doomed Tyson’s folk music career. Not willing to make their music political as most folk singers did, Ian and Sylvia’s popularity faded. They formed a band called Great Speckled Bird, and Tyson later put out a couple of solo albums, but none of it truly caught a gear. As their careers unraveled, so did their marriage. Despite hosting a show in Canada called the Ian Tyson Show until 1975, his heart wasn’t in it.
Tyson was adrift once again, and once again horses entered his life. He retreated to a small farm he had purchased outside of Bowmanville, Ontario. Stumbling into the cutting horse game, Tyson bought a daughter of Doc Bar—the father of the modern cutting horse. Tyson crossed the mare with Mr San Peppy and soon became a carrier of the cutting disease.
Showing horses just didn’t feel right in eastern Canada, so he drifted west to a bunkhouse on a Pincher Creek, Alberta, ranch managed by his friend Alan Young. At 44, Tyson was living the life of a 20-something cowboy.
He had the means to raise and train cutters and enjoyed significant success with them in the United States and Canada. Despite divorcing himself from the mainstream music scene, he played a local bar in Calgary called Ranchman’s. Out of the blue, Tyson learned of Neil Young’s cover of “Four Strong Winds,” and the royalty check came in within a year. Johnny Cash also recorded one of Tyson’s songs, “Red Velvet,” but the song never made the charts. Tyson was indifferent. Cowboying and keeping some money flowing from the Ranchman’s gig was enough.
Steadily, the horses drove Tyson’s passion for the West toward a deeper understanding of the Western lifestyle. This was the second time horses influenced the course of his career—but not the last. He met people who helped him discover even more about the West. From authentic cowboys inviting him on romps through real ranch country to well-read Westerners pointing him toward a story, Tyson established his cowboy credibility quietly in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Taking the Neil Young royalties, he bought a ranch in Alberta outside of Longview. Traditional cowboy songs soon began working their way into his set list alongside originals based on his favorite Western characters. Among the first was a tribute to Will James, the early influence of his cowboy dreams.
While playing at Ranchman’s, he met his second wife, Twylla, when she was 17. She encouraged him to record his cowboy music, and he set off to make a name for himself in the West. “The West has always been the land of reinvention,” he says. “Things aren’t working out back in Philadelphia so they leave home and try to become a cowboy. It’s been like that for 150 years. A clean start, a clean slate. You can start all over again…if you can stand the winters.”
Singing the West
It seems that regardless of whether they’re a South Texas puncher or a Nevada buckaroo, most cowboys—at least of a certain age—own Ian Tyson albums.
The rest, so to speak, is history. After releasing “Old Corrals and Sagebrush” in 1983, he was invited to play the first-ever National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., organized by Hal Cannon and Waddie Mitchell. For whatever reason, cowboy culture was ripe for renaissance. Tyson had a satchel full of Western songs, the music chops and the industry connections to ride the wave. “Cowboyography,” “I Outgrew the Wagon,” “And Stood There Amazed” and “Eighteen Inches of Rain” became cowboy standards.
Yet there’s something intangible that sets Tyson’s music apart in the cowboy music genre. It seems that regardless of whether they’re a South Texas puncher or a Nevada buckaroo, most cowboys—at least of a certain age—own Ian Tyson albums. (The real progressive ones have upgraded to digital.) While they may argue over dallying versus tying on or flat brim hats versus high sides, cowboys from every region seem to be able to agree on Tyson.
He believes there are a couple of reasons for this agreement. “Canadian cowboys are an eclectic mix,” he says. “The Nevada guys get a little narrow-minded about it and the Texan guys do, too, but those songs were written all over the place: Canada, Texas, California, and a lot in New Mexico.
“I learned all my riding in the Texas style, following guys like Buster Welch and Shorty Freeman around. I like the fact that it’s still regional. It’d be awful if everybody was the same. I don’t think that’d be very helpful. In Charlie Russell’s paintings of north of the Missouri from the late 1890s, there’s all those guys: grass rope guys, reata guys, slick forks and the whole nine yards. He loved that. And I like it, too.”
In his song “The Gift,” Tyson sings that Russell was given a gift by God to paint the West he saw before it was settled. Tyson, like Russell, has been given a gift by God to sing the West he’s seen before its next change.
That’s a significant reason why Tyson is so universally popular among cowboys. There’s romance in the fading West. He also sings about the heroes of the West. From Russell to Ross Knox and vaqueros to Texas cutters, there’s something any lover and active participant of the West can identify with. Plus, no two songs sound the same. This one might have a rock flavor, that one reggae, the next jazz and then he might just cover “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
The real attractiveness of Tyson’s music lies in his ability to make the cowboy life seem imperative to a meta-narrative of life. He refracts the overall human experience through the lens of the cowboy, giving us more than riding broncs and roping wild steers.
“Cowboy music gets pedantic,” Tyson says. “They get hung up on jerking the latigo and that kind of stuff. The great songs that have been written aren’t necessarily that way. ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ is probably in the top five cowboy songs of all time. It’s a mythic song, like a Greek tragedy. It’s got this huge Shakespearean scope. ‘Cowboy change your ways today or with us you will ride.’ That’s what we’ve got to strive for.
“My personal music hero is Mark Knofler and more and more his work is based on Celtic influences, just like the old cowboy songs are. I have to go back to the Scots-Irish tradition, I really do. ‘Streets of Laredo’ is based on an Irish song from the 17th century—they all came across the ocean. I’ve always wanted to do new music and some of the people don’t make those transitions—and don’t want to. Some people stick with you through them.”
Tyson and Johnny Cash
While Tyson’s first 75 years are certainly fascinating, the past years are no less worthy of examination. The transformation of his voice was of course the biggest news.
In the summer of 2006, a year after he and Twylla’s marriage ended, he was playing the Havelock Country Jamboree in Ontario and tried to out-sing a bad sound system. A few months later, he caught a virus while traveling and developed polyps in his throat. His voice dramatically changed from the clean, smooth sound to a gravelly whisper.
About that time a rising star on the Canadian country scene named Corb Lund befriended Tyson. Losing his family (he and Twylla have a daughter named Adelita) and his voice within a year of each other left him devastated.
Tyson was adrift again. Of course, a man drifting in his 70s looks very different from one in his 20s or 40s. He still had the ranch and the horses. In fact, he was sitting horseback when he heard “Four Strong Winds” was named the best Canadian song of all time.
Johnny Cash died a few years prior to that announcement, but in 2003 before his death, Cash cut a version of “Four Strong Winds.” American Recordings included it on a 2006 posthumous album, “American V.” Once again as Tyson hit a low spot, the song saw him through. He calls that version of the song his favorite. It would be the last connection between him and Cash.
“I really like John and John liked Sylvia and I,” Tyson says. “When I went back to cowboying in the late 1970s, I didn’t see much of John. He was in Nashville and he had big ups and downs in his career, too. John really loved a song of mine called ‘Red Velvet.’ He said, ‘It’s going to be a hit.’ I don’t know the producer’s name, but they cut it and it was a disaster. I never talked about it with him, and I think he wanted to just forget it. I think John cut ‘Four Strong Winds’—of course he liked the song a lot—but he knew he was coming to the end, and I think he wanted to make things right.”
Though honored and flattered by the many tributes surfacing for his life’s work, the reality was that Tyson’s voice was still gone. A sailor needs an ocean, a mama her baby to hold and a singer needs his voice. At the urging of Lund, he kept recording. Tyson called the sound his “Raven Voice,” and he put out “Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories” and “Raven Singer.”
After nearly six years with the Raven Voice, doctors decided they could operate, remove the polyps and, with therapy, Tyson could regain his old voice. It worked, but horses still tugged at his sleeve, beckoning him.
After the surgery and with his voice beginning to recover, Tyson was working with a colt in the summer of 2012 at the age of 78. “I got in an argument with a young horse that I raised—a four-year-old—and I lost, big time,” he says. “He really socked it to me. He slammed me down on the horn and I kept trying to get loose of him, and he finally ripped my shirt off. I thought, ‘I’m going to have to choose.’ The singing was going so well, the voice came back so well that I thought, ‘I’m going to hang it up.’
“That bronc, he did me a favor. He made me take a position. For years I tried to do both all the time. I really believe that you can’t. If you want to be really good—I’m not talking about Mickey Mouse stuff—you have to choose. There are not enough hours in the day, and when you get to a certain age, you have to face up.”
For the third time, a horse played a crucial role in Tyson focusing on music.
As an aside to this story, we drove to some old corrals after the interview to take a few photos. The ranch owner rode up on a three-year-old colt to visit. While discussing the bloodlines of his young horse, he offered Tyson a ride. Tyson demurred, but the cowboy insisted. With his manhood challenged, Tyson—with minor difficulty—swung aboard. Even as an aging cowboy, he was still irascible.
Writing the Final Chapter
Tyson’s final chapter is happening now, and he knows it. But he also knows what he’s capable of. While he’s not going to be starting colts, he’s still got plenty to give.
He’s professionally motivated to preserve his legacy, but perhaps not as driven as he was as a young man. As we talked about his children, he became distracted by two riders putting some miles on a couple of colts outside the window. His response to my question trailed off as his mind drifted to a subcortex cauldron bubbling with all the right ingredients to form a song: his passion for the cowboy life, longings for family, stubborn professionalism and God-given creativity. It’s sad, majestic, beautiful, tough and tender. It’s the West in a man.
This article appears in the Spring 2022 issue of the Ranch Record. Would you like to read more stories about ranching life? When you become a member of the Ranching Heritage Association, you’ll receive the award-winning Ranch Record magazine and more while supporting the legacy and preservation of our ranching heritage. Become a member today.
