Peter Rowan & Don Edwards – High Lonesome Cowboy
Bill Monroe & the Blue Grass Boys wore Stetsons. As part of a cultivated image, the classic western hats both complemented Big Mon’s professionalism and nodded toward country music’s most striking and once popular icon: the Hollywood cowboy. Lonesome, virtuous, self-reliant and virile, the cowboy who once dominated the identity of country music did so because he was unreal.
As the 20th century sped forward, the cowboy on the screen and on the radio took his time, lent a hand, and crooned in the wilderness. He was, and in some ways still remains, our most necessary fiction. Yes, he eases manifest destiny’s guilty conscience, but he also gestures toward a life we can’t help but wish were true. When he sings, we are returned to sentimentality, returned to ourselves.
Like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Don Edwards is an east coast urbanite who remade himself as a vagabond vaquero. Born in Boonton, New Jersey, Edwards began his musical career at 16 at Six Flags Over Texas, but he had been absorbing the music of Gene Autry, Tex Ritter and Roy Rogers since he was old enough to cradle a guitar. He gave Nashville a shot in the 1960s, but his gentile croon and determined obsession with the cowboy style captured the attention of neither the countrypolitans nor the authenticity-minded new folkies.
For the last three decades, though, Edwards has become something of an Alan Lomax of cowboy songs. He has collected, published, recorded and preserved scores of the old ballads; Songs Of The Cowboy, his tribute to another cowboy historian, Jack Thorpe, remains a touchstone for the style.
Peter Rowan, too, hails from the east coast; like Edwards, he fell under the spell of the west at a young age, though for Rowan it was Tex-Mex music, which he played with high school friends. He quickly found his way into the Boston-area old-time and bluegrass scene, establishing himself as a keen instrumentalist and an even better singer. At the age of 22 he joined the Blue Grass Boys, singing lead vocals with Big Mon for three years until he fell in with counterculture grassers David Grisman and John Nagy (with whom he recorded two albums of folk-rock under the nom de experiment Earth Opera).
Since the 1970s, despite occasional forays into country rock and Mexican music, Rowan has focused largely on blending bluegrass and folk impulses, and has written as many classic songs as any of his bluegrass peers. Many of those songs can be found on 1988’s New Moon Rising, while his most personal/political album, 1990’s Dust Bowl Children, has the fierce resonance of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads or even John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath.
The voices of Rowan and Edwards, both slightly wan but far from dissipated, shed just the right light on High Lonesome Cowboy. The songs are all traditional, save Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” (here called “Reno Blues”), Mother Maybelle Carter’s “Buddies In The Saddle”, and Bill Monroe’s “Midnight On The Stormy Deep”. Rowan and Edwards’ harmonies are unstudied and easygoing, warmly layering like rough blankets, faintly echoing like whispers in ravines. The picking, aided by Tony Rice, Noman & Nancy Blake, and Billy & Bryn Bright, is subtle, expressive and spare — as it should be.
Were it only for the reunion of Norman Blake and Tony Rice on five cuts, these sessions would be important. On the opening “Take Me Back To The Range”, Blake and Rice trade licks without ego or fandango, as if each were outdoing the other by underdoing all they could. On the closing “I’m Going To Leave Old Texas Now”, as Rowan and Edwards yodel-hoot in the background, Blake and Rice find a way to make the simplest loping melody glow like a low setting sun. On the instrumental “The Old Grey Mare Came Tearing Out Of The Wilderness”, the rest of the players step aside to let Norman & Nancy Blake ramble over the fastest, finest guitar runs. The oft-recorded “Trail To Mexico” is given a tightly harmonized, almost gay reading, while “Goodbye Old Paint”, arranged for clawhammer banjo and lightly strummed guitar, sounds like an elegy for so much more than a good pony.
As with any traditionalist project, High Lonesome Cowboy could have easily tripped on its own good intentions. But this fusion of bluegrass skill and western romance never feels pedantic or nostalgic, though in its melodies and stories there is much to learn and even more to dream about. The album’s sweetness derives from a sense of loss — not the loss of anything as obvious as innocence, but a deeper loss that sings of what we might still find: roots, reunion, home.
A cowboy song, when sung by voices as sure and true as those of Rowan and Edwards, can be more than a myth. It can be a way back home, no matter where we have strayed.