Music

Ian Tyson: a singing, songwriting Western icon

By JORDAN RANE

Exactly who is Ian Tyson? No, we're not asking if you've heard of the guy (but on the off chance that you haven't, consider this a very fortunate, belated discovery). What we're really wondering is if this former British Columbia rodeo kid turned 1960s New York Folk Revival star turned Alberta rancher turned celebrated Western Revival singer-songwriter can be neatly packaged into an opening paragraph for an interview with the man. Apparently not.

Easy as it may be to pin some Western icons down to a single image, this one's been riding his own ruggedly self-defined trail in music, ranching, cowboy culture, and Western Canadiana over the last five decades. It's a wayward career to be sure, but fueled with half a century's worth of milestones that include the prestigious Order of Canada, an NCRA World Championship Futurity finalist buckle, an induction into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame, and a 2006 national poll that honored his '60s-era folk hit "Four Strong Winds" as the No. 1 Canadian song of the last century.

Forty-odd years ago, Tyson was half of the influential folk duo Ian & Sylvia, penning and recording chart-topping songs that would bring him early fame and covers from admiring artists like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, Suzy Bogguss, and Neil Young. Today, he's an Alberta-based rancher with more than a dozen solo albums to his name, including the platinum-selling Cowboyography (Vanguard, 1987) and his latest release, Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories (Stony Plain, 2008).

So how does a veteran horseman and musician handle the dual demands of a busy ranch in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies and a solid tour schedule stretching from Saskatchewan to San Diego at the unimpeded age of 75? "I don't really know," Tyson says matter-of-factly right after a morning songwriting session and just before jumping on a horse for the afternoon. "I guess the music comes out of the lifestyle."

Understated and a tad austere? Maybe. But it's Ian Tyson. That's just who he is, and just the way we like him.

Cowboys & Indians: Your American fans would love to claim you as their own, but that distinction goes to Western Canada, where you've lived most of your life and rekindled your music career. In spite of your wide following throughout the North American West, are you an Albertan, first and foremost?
Ian Tyson: Well, I was born and raised in British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, but Alberta has been home for the last 35 years, so my ties here are pretty strong. Especially in the whole ranching community south of Calgary where I live — which is really one of the last true cowboy countries on either side of the border. And as far as political borders go, cowboys in Alberta may say "eh" and cowboys in Montana may say "huh," but beyond that there isn't a whole lot of difference between them in my view. When it comes to Western culture, I don't think the 49th parallel ultimately plays such a huge role.

C&I: What does "home" look like outside your front door — in a few broad strokes?
Tyson: I live on a ranch about six miles east of the town of Longview and the old Cowboy Trail in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. On one side of me is a big front face of shining mountains and on the other is lots of prairie — about 1,500 miles of flat buffalo range. On a perfect day, like today, I can't imagine being anywhere else in the world. Of course, I'm not going to say there aren't those other days when you think, What am I doing here? Especially [last] winter, which was one of the hardest, most schizophrenic seasons weatherwise I can remember. It's beautiful country, and it can be brutally tough as well.

C&I: Is it true that you do most of your writing and composing every morning in a little stone cottage on the property about a mile down a gravel road from your house? A place that even journalists can't reach you at because there are no phone jacks?
Tyson: Well, there are actually phone jacks, just no phones plugged into them. But, yes, that is true. That's my early morning thing — writing songs in an old stone house that was built back in the homesteader days. That's where the ideas flow. Or at least you hope they do. Once you're my age and you've written a couple hundred of these things, you realize it doesn't get any easier.

C&I: You're on a working ranch. Are you still involved in the property's day-to-day business as well?
Tyson: Very much so. In the winter, I try to go on the road and tour, but we run yearling cattle here May through October, so right now there's lots of fence-riding to do and checking and doctoring and all of that stuff. I also train cutting horses and the herding is great for that, too, because you need cattle for your cutting endeavors. Of course, while all of this is happening I'll still have to be making time for the music. I really have to play every day for about an hour or so or I lose it, just in my fingers alone.

C&I: Is it tough juggling the ranching and the music, or do they complement each other?
Tyson: Well, on a certain level they do complement each other, but from a purely practical standpoint it's still a constant challenge managing both at the same time. At any given time, either the music suffers or the horses do. Somehow I've managed to keep on going and keep the music pretty solid. The "struggle" continues — but I'm not complaining.

C&I: How do you write? Longhand, with a pad of paper, a cup of coffee, a window with a gorgeous view, and a guitar?
Tyson: Yeah, all of that — minus the guitar. I try to get away from the guitar when I'm writing because unless you're Andrés Segovia, your shortcomings on the instrument can steer you astray. In fact, when I do music seminars I tell people to try to get away from the guitar when they're writing because it can be like a trap. It will dictate stuff to you that's based on the limits of your musical scope. But walk across the prairie or up through the mountains and you're free to grab onto all those greater influences.

C&I: Earlier this morning, you were writing. What about later this afternoon? Will you be out riding?
Tyson: I'll be trotting my little mare up the pass for a few miles this afternoon. She's real fat from the winter and I'm trying to get her tummy worked down so we can go to the shows. I don't know how much opportunity I'll have, but I'm gonna try to get her ready anyway in case I can show a little bit.

C&I: Let's rewind 30 years for a minute. You're heading back West with fame and the '60s folk scene in the rear view. At the time, did you think you were taking a brief musical hiatus, or were you onto other pastures and not really expecting any new chapters in your music career?
Tyson: I didn't really know. The music was kind of in limbo and I got very caught up in training cutting horses, which was just starting to become really prominent in Alberta. An old friend of mine was the foreman of a big ranch down in Pincher Creek, a famous old cow town in the south end of the province, and he said, "I got a real nice cabin on a creek up the river. Why don't you stay for a while?" And to make a long story short, I did. I brought my horses, stayed there for two years, and it was a wonderful time. Just an idyllic couple of years, chasing cows and living the life.

C&I: With your music on the back burner?
Tyson: Yeah, there really wasn't much music happening for a while. Just an around-the-campfire kind of thing and occasionally on weekends to augment my income at an old honky-tonk hangout in Calgary where I met my second wife. Then we scraped and saved and bought this ranch up in Longview and got some more horses and continued with that work. And some years later I recorded an album called Cowboyography, which happened to coincide with the beginning of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, where I performed to a very receptive audience. Suddenly the album went platinum and without much effort I found I had a whole new career in music.

C&I: And a whole new fan base ...
Tyson: Those cowboys down in Nevada didn't know anything about Ian & Sylvia and couldn't have cared less, but they loved my band and my new music. And I think Cowboyography just really jolted something. People started saying that this guy Tyson is writing a whole new kind of Western music which has contemporary aspects to it — including jazz, blues, and pop. And, well, news always travels pretty fast in that "cowboy underground." It was an exciting time.

C&I: Your latest album, Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories, is generating some more buzz in that very same pipeline. Is this another exciting time for you?
Tyson: It really is. And, again, quite unexpected — especially after my voice collapsed on me a few years ago and I really thought that it might be the end, y'know, that I was all washed up.

C&I: Your stoic explanation on record is that you fought the sound system during a concert — and lost. And then got hit with a bad virus that changed your voice. Is that what happened?
Tyson: Yeah, basically.

C&I: That must have been a really tough adjustment, going from one of the smoothest voices in the business to a more gravelly sound.
Tyson: It scared me. I'd say it's the most traumatic musical hurdle I've ever faced, but at the same time it was sort of exhilarating because it was like starting out again. It's hard to describe the approach to singing — the whole mechanics of it — but it was almost like learning from scratch. I remember the first few concerts back in the fall after my voice went. I walked out on that stage, and when I opened my mouth I really wasn't sure what was going to come out or how the audience would react.

C&I: Were you at all surprised by the response?
Tyson: Very surprised. And delighted. And relieved. I remember people looking pretty shocked at first. There was just this silence for the first couple of songs. But then the music started to reach them, we found our groove, and all of a sudden something amazing was happening.

C&I: And now people are even preferring your "new" voice to your "old" one.
Tyson: Life is funny — but, yeah, it's true. There were several favorable reviews afterwards about "a new intensity" and "a certain vulnerability" that reaches out to people. And it's just been growing from there. I have to say, I was resistant to even making this album, but Corb Lund, a wonderful young singer-songwriter up here, kind of convinced me to do it. I didn't think my listeners who'd followed me faithfully all these years were gonna accept this new voice. And Corb said to me flat out, "You need to do this record. I like your new voice better anyway — your old voice was getting boring." [Laughs.] Well, I have a lot of faith in his opinion. I cut the record in Nashville in about two and a half days and wasn't sure what to think. But the reactions surpassed all of my expectations. No one was more surprised than me.

C&I: What led you to sing about the wolves of Yellowstone for your epic title song on the new album?
Tyson: A very close friend of mine wrote the original lyrics for this one — and talk about epic. It was originally twice the length it is now, and it's still pretty long. But it's such a compelling story, this pack of wolves being transported from Canada's Yellowhead Pass to Yellowstone Park, where they'd become extinct. We know a lot about what happened to them because these Alberta wolves were captured and collared before being released down in Wyoming. The main first-person narrator of the song is the original alpha wolf from Alberta, who finally gets killed along with a little gray female wolf, his true love. So it's a sad tale, but an amazing one. And it really happened.

C&I: This isn't the first time you've recorded a song from an animal's perspective. The lyrics from "La Primera" [recorded on the album Lost Herd (Vanguard, 1999) and recently published in an illustrated book La Primera: The Story of Wild Mustangs (Tundra, 2009)] recount the origins of the Spanish Mustang in America — from the horse's standpoint. What attracts you to these first-"person" renderings?
Tyson: Animals are so mysterious to me, and I guess I'm just intrigued by their sensibility and their thought processes insofar as we can imagine them. They have loyalty, love, and this whole range of qualities, but structured so differently than ours. And it's endlessly fascinating. I mean, I've been trying to figure out horses for 60 years now.

C&I: What fostered your initial interest in horses as a kid and competing in rodeo a little later on? Was this something you inherited?
Tyson: My dad loved horses. He sold insurance in British Columbia to make a living, but he loved playing polo. I mean, "regular guy" polo — nothing high-society or anything. I used to go on these cheap-horse-buying trips with him, usually to an Indian reservation. He wouldn't spend more than a hundred dollars on a horse, and I was sort of his "tryout man." I'd get on the horse and see if it worked — and, lo and behold, I got bitten by the bug. And then the rodeo came to town and I started doing that. Even when I was in art school later on, I was rodeoing all over [British Columbia] and Alberta during the summers and just generally picking up this lifestyle that became Ian Tyson, I guess.

C&I: Ian Tyson the musician came a little later?
Tyson: What happened was I broke my ankle in my early 20s during this little country rodeo just northwest of Calgary. I still remember that horse — this big Thoroughbred mare. She bucked me over the front end and I sort of did a cartwheel and landed on my feet. Then as she ran by, she either kicked or stepped on my ankle, which literally exploded. I ended up at a hospital ward in Calgary next to some kid who had a guitar but didn't know how to play it. And neither did I. So we whiled away the hours trying to learn how to play the guitar. Eventually, the music really started to overshadow art school and everything else, until basically I packed up my saddle, as the cowboys say, and went East, met Sylvia, and on and on it went.

C&I: So do you credit that rodeo injury for your music career — in an oddly fateful sort of way?
Tyson: Strangely enough, that's why I became a guitar player really — a horse stepped on my ankle.

C&I: One more reason to be grateful for horses. Back to the new album: We want to know some of your all-time favorite songs in the Ian Tyson collection [see sidebar], but do you have a favorite song on your latest release?
Tyson: I would have to say the second track, "Fiddler Must Be Paid." I think this one is as good a love song as I've ever written. It's about a love affair that's come and gone — and I think that's all I'll say about it.

C&I: You've written a lot of love songs about relationships with bittersweet endings. Is that your take? Do they usually end up that way?
Tyson: No, I don't think so. I mean, mine seem to, but I wouldn't wish that on other people. I still carry the torch. But I think Hank Williams put it best when he said, "A broken heart — it don't hurt your songwriting." And, boy, he was right.

C&I: What do you think it is about the West and the cowboy life that inspires a good song, at least for you?
Tyson: Well, the West has always been a place I relate to and love, and it's just kind of a passionate thing for me in a very real sense because it's my life. It's always been romanticized, the West. Buffalo Bill romanticized it. Teddy Roosevelt romanticized it. Hundreds of country singers back East have romanticized it. But there's always been a lot of sadness in the West, too. It's always been that way, from the time the Plains Indians were pushed off to all of today's challenges. Y'know, my West was a huge, empty place. It was space. And that space is rapidly disappearing. But that passion for the West, it doesn't go away, in spite of everything that's happening to it. Like my patron saint [turn-of-the-century Western artist] Charlie Russell said about the West, "It's like a woman. You may lose a lover, but you will never forget her."

C&I: Is that part of your life's work — to write about these changes truthfully and "keep it real?"
Tyson: Yes, it is. But I still want to produce art that reaches people and hopefully lifts them up. There are still things in the West that give us cause to be cautiously optimistic. You've gotta have hope.

C&I: Looking back at a long, varied, incredibly full career, what are some of your proudest moments?
Tyson: Oh, gosh. I guess Cowboyography was a huge breakthrough for me, and I've derived a lot of pride out of it. In 1989, I made the finals at the world championship cutting horse futurity in Fort Worth and that was a thrill — I still have the old buckle. A few years ago, I was pretty blown-away when "Four Strong Winds" was polled by [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] radio listeners as the "Number One Canadian Song of the 20th Century." And then I guess this new album is up there as well. I'm still trying to get a handle on it.

C&I: What's next for you?
Tyson: Keeping busy on the ranch and doing some more touring to promote the album. I don't know if it'll be my last one. I hope it isn't, but it might be. Right now, I just want to keep it alive because people are liking it so much.

C&I: Is retirement about as foreign a word to you as we think it is?
Tyson: Yeah, I guess it is. [Laughs.] At least according to my accountant.

Issue: December 2009