PRESS KIT

Stories & Questions for Interviewers

---

 What is your background?

I am the oldest of five children. My father was a career Naval Officer so we moved every two or three years. I was in ten different schools by the time I graduated from high school in 1958. I attended the University of Rochester for one year, Westminster College of Salt Lake City for one year, and then entered the U.S. Naval Academy in July 1960, graduating in June 1964. I spent five years as a Naval Officer on board ships, with the last year as the Advisor to the Commanding Officer of a Vietnamese ship patrolling the coast of Viet Nam. I resigned my commission in May 1969 and began my MBA at Harvard in September of that year, completing it in June 1971. In August 1972, I accepted a full time faculty position in a new MBA program at Frostburg State University in western Maryland. I completed my doctorate in 1990 at the University of Pittsburgh. I held that position for 37 years until 2009, when I retired from a W-2 form but not from my academic interests and certainly not from exploring life and my other interests. I married in 1975 and divorced in 2001. I have a grown son and daughter; my son is married, my daughter is not. I live in Cumberland, Maryland, in western Maryland and across the Potomac River from West Virginia. I love to travel and have been to 30 countries around the world. I am a big fan of competitive high school marching band and read voraciously.

 

What attracts you to cowboy and western music?

I lived in San Diego in the late Forties and early Fifties when I was in third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Like most of my classmates, I would go to the Saturday afternoon matinee to watch a newsreel, one or two cartoons, a cowboy movie, and a serial. The movie often contained a cowboy/western song. My favorite cowboys were Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, the Range Rider, and Rex Allen. I also listened to the weekday late afternoon radio shows on Sky King, the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, Straight Arrow, and others. When I went into junior high, I left that stage of my youth behind but I always liked the cowboy and western music. It is melodic, easy to understand, and focuses on the beauty of the west and cowboy way of life and its hardships.

Tell me about the cowboy song eras.

I have come to understand the cowboy and western song genre as falling into three general eras: 1850-1900, 1900-1957, and 1957-present.

1850-1900. Open and Closed Range.

1850 -1875 was the era of the Open Range and the cattle trails (Shawnee, Eastern/Chisholm, Western, Goodnight-Loving, etc.). The Open Range era was the time of the extinction of the great bison herds and the ending of the dominance of indigenous native societies in the plains and west of the plains. And after the end of the War of Secession n 1965, the opening of the great cattle trails from Texas to the Kansas railheads and new ranches in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas.

1875-1900 was the era of the Closed Range and the expansion of the railroads as the appearance of barbed wire in 1875 led to a rapid fencing-in of the open range as private property. The songs of these two eras were based on traditional folk tunes that arrived with immigrants or were composed by individuals, both cowboy and non-cowboy. Many of the words to the songs were carried over into the cowboy songs but many songs were just the melodies of the folk songs with new words created by the cowboys. There was a strong “bawdy” character to the words created by the cowboys.

1900-1957. Western Nostalgia and Silver Screen.

1900-1930. As the western frontier became settled and the land that is now the contiguous 48 states became defined by state borders, there emerged a nostalgia for the frontier days and the old west. Many people wrote songs to hearken back to the old west and days of the open and closed ranges. The songs reflected an idealized view of the cowboy way of life. The cowboy and western movies were mostly silent films.

1930-1957. In 1932, Gene Autry appeared in the first silver screen cowboy movie, launching the Silver Screen Cowboy era. Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Charles Sterrett, Rex Allen, and many others appeared in a great many black and white and later color cowboy movies that were not authentic replicas of the actual lives of cowboys during the 1850-1900 eras. Many song writers wrote songs for those movies as well as songs for general performance. The last of the Silver Screen cowboy movies coincided with the last Rex Allen movie in about 1957.

1957-Present. Contemporary Cowboy and Western Songs.

With the 1950’s emergence of television and movie reruns, the emergence of rock and roll, and the decision by the country music people to create their own Country Music Association without any connection to cowboy and western music except for the clothing, cowboy and western music fell into its own small musical and performing niche, in which it effectively has remained. But the composition of cowboy and western music has continued, with an expansive repertoire that is currently the primary performance focus of song writers, cowboy poets, and performers who remain with the genre. The Western Music Association, now the International Western Music Association, was founded around 1989 by a core group of prominent cowboy and western performers of both song and poetry. It continues today as the prime mover for the genre.

How did you get into cowboy and western music in general and western yodeling in particular?

In May 2007, a Naval Academy classmate and friend of mine sent me a YouTube clip of an eleven year old girl by the name of Taylor Ware, from Franklin, TN, doing her first televised performance on America’s Got Talent. Her yodeling performance of Patsy Montana’s “I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” was amazing. I was so impressed with the sophistication of her yodeling, her stage presence, and her ability to connect with the audience that I regularly, almost daily, would view the video late in the evening. After about a month of doing that, I discovered she had a website where I could listen to three of her songs. That became my late evening treat almost every night. After another month of that, I realized that there was something more than a passing fascination. So I wrote her a letter telling her how much I enjoyed her yodeling and asked her how I could purchase the instructional tape her mother had purchased for her when she was six years old and learned on her own.

In late July, I received a very nice email from her father thanking me for my nice letter and telling me that I could purchase the instructional tape by Margo Smith, also from the Nashville area, by going to her website. I immediately did that and ordered the tape. It came in early August just as I was leaving for a conference. So when I returned home in mid-August, I began to work my way through the tape in secret, telling no one. It took me six weeks to finish the tape and learn three yodels and a song. During that six weeks, I also went on-line and purchased forty cowboy and western yodeling CDs, listened to all of them, and selecting eighteen songs I wanted to learn. Since none of the songs were in keys that suited my voice range, I learned them a cappella by listening to them over and over again, writing down the words, and devising my own written language for the yodels. Still, I did all this in secret.

Sometime in November, after learning almost all of the eighteen songs, I wanted to have instrumental music to practice with. I had at the time, and still have as one of my best friends, another member of the Frostburg State University faculty, an amazingly talented folk musician named Greg Latta, a physics professor, who also had a sound studio in his home and four CDs of his own. So, I went up to visit him, swore him and his wife to secrecy, and asked if he could take the CDs with the eighteen songs I had chosen and put them in my key, retaining the regular tempo. He said he could do that and that it would be easy. After a couple of weeks, he gave me a disk with all eighteen songs on it at the regular tempo and in the key I specified. He could not eliminate the singers from the songs so now they sounded like Alvin and Chipmunks. Great! I had music to practice with.

That lasted for another two months when, in early 2008, I tired of listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks and asked Greg to prepare my own musical tracks of the songs. That would be a much longer process as I did not play the guitar and Greg would have to do the instrumental music. Slowly over the next eight months, Greg fed me the musical tracks that became mine.

In June of 2008, I finally let my son and daughter and my siblings know that I had learned how to yodel and that I was singing cowboy and western songs. I surprised all of them as well as my friends. And when Greg and I had all of the songs with instrumental accompaniment, Greg and his wife began encouraging me to produce a CD. That came out in October 2009.

Tell me about your CDs.

I have two CDs. The first, titled “Yodeling Familiar Trails,” with Greg Latta providing all of the accompaniment and doing the sound engineering, came out in October 2010. It has twelve songs, all of them yodeling songs. It is a mix of early and late twentieth century yodeling songs and a wide range of yodeling styles and difficulties. The National Traditional Country Music Association awarded it the “Best Traditional Yodeling CD” for 2011. The second CD is titled “Earning My Spurs.” It came out in 2018, again engineered by Greg Latta, but the instrumentals largely mine as I had learned how to play the guiter. It has 12 songs as well but this one has eight non-yodeling songs and four yodeling songs. I have a particular affection for the songs from the first half of the twentieth century, many of which are classics and beautiful but are seldom sung any more by contemporary cowboy and western singers. The National Traditional Country Music Association awarded it the “Best Western Yodeling CD” for 2018. I am currently working on a third CD. [Meta data in the mastering; song title, time, artist, composer]

How do you select the songs for your repertoire?

I am not a songwriter. I am a song finder. Over the last fifteen years, I have collected an extensive library of cowboy and western songbooks. Books by Howard Thorp, Bob Tinsley’s “For a Cowboy Has to Sing,” John and Allen Lomax, Dick Lingenfelter and Dick Dwyer, Austin and Alta Fife, Eric van Hamersveld’s “It Was Always the Music,” Ernie Sites, Hal Leonard, Irwin Silber and Earl Robinson, Hal Cannon’s “Old Time Cowboy Songs,” Don Edwards, Alex Gordon, Ranger Doug Green, and several anthologies of American Folk Songs. Then there are such interesting titles as Glenn Ohrlin’s “The Hellbound Train,” Guy Logsdon’s “The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing,” and Katie Lee’s “Ten Thousand Goddamn Cattle” that are a combination of history, stories, and traditional cowboy songs. I am also collecting Australian Bush Ballad music as there is quite a cowboy song tradition that has emerged from Australia.

More recently, I have begun to scour Special Collection libraries for sheet music and collections of obscure songs from the last four decades of the nineteenth century. You would be surprised how many wonderful cowboy and western songs are out there that have been completely forgotten and no one today has heard them.

I also love to listen to contemporary song writers performing their own songs. There are a number of songs in my repertoire that have been written by people who are my friends and who are still writing wonderful songs and performing. When I hear a song that appeals to me and touches my heart, I ask for the music. Sometimes it is available on a CD. Sometimes I ask for and receive the songwriter’s own sheet music.

Finally, every cowboy and western songs has a story. It is as much fun for me to investigate the story of the song as it is to learn and perform a song. The key question is: How did this song come about? So I try to find out as much about the songwriter and the context of the song as I can. I use that information to introduce the song to an audience and connect it with other historically accurate information about the era and the subject of the song as I can. Researching that information often introduces me to new people who become my friends and often connects me to other songs.

Tell me about an obscure song that you have found and perform.

In developing my third CD, I have been looking for songs from states where cowboys worked. In this particular case, I was preparing for a 12 day performing tour along the International Chisholm Cattle Trail in Kansas in May 2022 and wanted to find a song that reflected Kansas. An extensive internet search turned up one source that had over a dozen songs about Kansas, many of which were on the site to listen to. The one that caught my ear was an instrumental but no words. The reference information for the song indicated the composers of both the music and the words and listed the location of the song in a collection held by the Special Collections Section at the Indiana State University in Terra Haute, Indiana. I emailed them and asked if they would photocopy the song with the words and send it to me. They indicated that they could not do that because they did not hold the copyright.

In August of 2022, I made a road trip to visit friends in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. So I added an extension of the trip to Indiana State University to see if I could obtain the sheet music in person. Although they were hesitant to do that, after I gave them a four song performance and a copy of my first CD, they were so enthralled that they relented and I walked away with my prized copy of the “Kansas Waltz.” It is now in my repertoire and I love it. No one has heard it sung live for over a century.

You indicated that you did not play the guitar when you began yodeling and singing cowboy and western songs. Tell me the story about learning to play the guitar.

I did not play the guitar when I began yodeling in 2007. As a matter of fact, I did not begin to play the guitar until January 2011. I attended the Western Music Association Convention in Albuquerque for the first time in November of 2008. I took my music tracks disk and a small CD player with me and signed up for a 15 minute spot on the Open Mike stage. For my spot, I plugged in my CD player, inserted the disk, and sang three yodeling songs. When I finished, however, one of the long time members who was in the audience called me aside and informed me that karaoke was not encouraged there. I told him I wanted to compete in the Yodeling Contest but did not play the guitar. So he found a guitar player for me. For 2009 and 2010, I asked new WMA friends to play for me. But in January 2011, I asked Greg Latta to give me weekly lessons. Those lasted for three months when I struck out on my own learning. It took until November 2012 for me to get proficient enough to not embarrass myself when I played and sung in public. In 2011, it was very amusing to watch and listen to me learning how to play the guitar and yodel at the same time. But practicing four to five days a week since 2011 has taken me to the point where much of my playing is now second nature.

Tell me abut the art and craft of yodeling.

You can learn all about the history and full cultural range of yodeling by reading Bart Plantenga’s two fine books: Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World (2004), and Yodel in Hi-Fi: From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronics (2012). Yodeling is found in many cultural settings around the globe, from indigenous to classical operatic. Yodeling is fundamentally singing by moving from the regular chest voice to the falsetto in rapid sequence. Finding that break between the chest voice and the falsetto is the most challenging for most people who try to learn. Many cannot find that break or the break is not clear and clean. For those who find a clear and clean break, staying on pitch is the next challenge. Some do not have the ear for clear and correct intonation, so more fall by the wayside. For those who find a clean break and have a good ear for intonation, the final challenge is how far along the difficulty continuum can they progress. I am still trying to discover the technique for reaching that highest level of difficulty that is the clear but very rapid articulation of long yodel routines. Only a few yodelers reach this pinnacle.

I classify yodeling into three general styles: alpine yodeling, country yodeling, and cowboy/western yodeling. Alpine yodeling is found in the alpine countries of Europe: Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Italy, France, and Slovenia. If you have seen the movie “Sound of Music,” Julie Andrews yodels in that style. If you liked the traditional country music of Jimmy Rodgers, he is perhaps the best example there. Those yodels are short and not very difficult. The cowboy and western music of Roy Rogers is perhaps the best example of that style, with Ranger Doug Green of Riders in the Sky the best contemporary example. The country and western styles in the United States are direct descendents of alpine yodeling brought to this country by immigrants. There is one Australian woman who loves to yodel to classical music and opera and does it fantastically well.

Where do you like to perform?

My most favorite venue is performing for elementary school kids. They are so open to new experiences and have so many questions. I like to mix cowboy and western songs with an accurate history of the west and the cowboy way of life. I also have a very simple song, Yodeling 101, where I teach the kids how to do a simple yodel. They eat it up. I encourage them to go home and practice and then come back into class and show their teachers how good they can yodel. That brings a huge laugh from the kids and rolling eyebrows from the teachers.

House Concerts are another performing venue. This is where someone who loves cowboy and western music opens his or her home to friends and neighbors for a traveling performer. It is an intimate setting where the audience can get to know the performer, ask questions, and perhaps purchase a CD or two. It is tradition to pass the boot for voluntary contributions to the performer.

Cowboy Music and Poetry Gatherings are a third. They occur throughout the year and mostly in cowboy country west of the Mississippi River. They can range from one day to three or four day affairs. The daytime is filed with several stages going on at once plus an open mike stage for those not on the formal program. In the evening, there is generally a formal concert that features the main headliners for the gathering. And after the concert, there is always a long jam session well into the night where those who are not on the formal program can mix and perform with those who are. It is great fun.

Finally, for the cowboy and western music genre, there is the annual International Western Music Association Convention in Albuquerque in mid-November. Five days of almost non-stop performing and workshops. It is like being a kid in a candy store, rich with variety and meeting new people and finding new songs.

I would add one other venue. That is Open Mike sessions at local and regional establishments, brew pubs, bars, music venues. Since I live in the east, these are more important to me than they might be for those who live in the west and have much easier access to the Gatherings and house concerts that are much more prevalent there.

I see that you also have written some cowboy/western poems. Tell me more.

This is a very recent creative endeavor for me. In 2010, while exploring eastern Arizona, I had an inspiration for a poem which I tentatively called “Arizona Sunrise.” I wrote down a first verse and some ideas for other verses but never went back to completing it. In my first performing tour in August 2018, while driving across the prairies of eastern Wyoming, I had another inspiration for a poem about what it might have been like without any towns, fences, roads, and immigrants for the bison to roam freely. Again, I wrote down a first verse and some ideas for others but never went back to see if I could finish it.

In late 2021 and early 2022, in preparation for my planned performing tour along the Chisholm Cattle Trail in Kansas in May 2022, I was reading extensively about the four cattle trail systems that emerged in the plains states after 1865. As I finished reading the Kraisinger’s book on the Western Cattle Trail, I began waking up around 6 o’clock – not my normal time to get up – with verses of a poem on the Western Cattle Trail running through my head. I keep a pencil and pad of paper beside my bed and wrote these verses down. By the end of a week, I had a complete draft. So I wondered if I might pull out my notes on the Bison ideas I had in 2018 and see if I could work on that. After a week, I had completed a draft of that poem. I was on a roll. Then I went to my notes on Arizona Sunrise and, after another week, I had a completed draft of that. I then spent all of February revising, sharing my work with my good friend and cowboy poet, Dale Page, who made some critical suggestions. By the end of February I had three completed and finished poems.

“The Bison” was published in the Western Way in August and I recited it in the Poetry Contest at the IWMA Convention in November. I have yet to learn the other two by heart but that will come. When will I get another inspiration? Who knows? But now I know what to do with that inspiration.

Tell me about the cattle trails and the open range.

Songs of the open range focus on cattle, horses, cowboys, unrequited love, mom, dying, religion.

It is a complex, interwoven, and evolving tapestry of moving Texas longhorn cattle from sothern Texas to the railheads in Kansas and Nebraska, the impact of Texas Cattle fever and the western movement of the quarantine lines, the demand for beef in the Midwest and east, the westward push of the railroads (Union Pacific and the ATSF), the Homestead Act and homesteading, the bison and the prairie ecology, the evolving mosaic of the indigenous clans, the cattle towns, the cattle kings, the cowboys, the soiled doves.

Although there were cattle trails to Missouri and Arizona before the War of Secession, the main cattle trail era was 1865-1890. During that period, there were four major cattle trail systems: the Shawnee, the Eastern/Chisholm, the Western, and the Goodnight-Loving. Each had its heyday, with the Western and the Goodnight-Loving lasting the longest. The longhorn cattle went from southern Texas to railheads in Kansas and Nebraska for the first three and Colorado for the Goodnight-Loving. Some of the cattle trails took cattle to Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas to establish new herds there. The cattle that went to the railheads were shipped to eastern markets. Refrigeration cars and ships and closing in the open range through homesteading and barbed wire essentially ended the cattle trail era in 1890. But the cattle trail era made a lasting impression on the emergence of the immigrant population of the plains and the states.

I see from your photos and CDs that you wear very colorful western shirts. Tell me about them.

I am a singer who loves cowboy and western music, not an authentic cowboy who loves to sing cowboy and western music. If I were an authentic cowboy who loved to sing this music, I would likely wear a working cowboy’s clothes. And I know some authentic cowboys who wear the clothes of a working cowboy when they sing. I have been influenced by the silver screen cowboys and the clothes they wore, even though those clothes were not actually the clothes that actual cowboys wore. I am attracted to vivid colors and vintage cowboy shirts offer those colors. The two best makers of vintage cowboy shirts are Rockmoint Shirt Company and the Scully Shirt Company, both of Denver. I have five Rockmounts and one Scully. I get many compliments on my shirts at my performing venues. I have had attractive young ladies tell me I am the best dressed cowboy at the event and ask me what I wan t for the shirt I am wearing. I smile, thank them for the compliment, and ask them what they are willing to offer. That always ends with laughter, an interesting conversation, and my shirt staying on me. I love to wear those wonderful shirts.