Ian Tyson Concert in Telluride 10/12/13

30 Sep Ian Tyson Concert in Telluride 10/12/13

Ian Tyson in concert at the Telluride Conference Center, Saturday, October 12, 2013

In the middle of an earlier century my brother said I had to hear this new folk duet, Ian and Sylvia. I heard them, liked what I heard, especially their hit song, “Four Strong Winds,” but I was mostly listening to jazz in those years. Later I went back to Country and Western, but before long I found that Top 40 Country left me cold: the Western had been taken out, and Country was dressed up with violins as opposed to fiddles.

Fast forward to 1984. That summer I was cowboying with friends in Montana. The cassette on the deck in the pickup was Ian Tyson’s “Cowboyography” and it was on repeat. I was hooked: I came back to my roots. Tyson sang the music I had heard around the branding fires in the evenings after the roundups of my youth.

In his autobiography, “The Long Trail,” Tyson makes the point that people have been lamenting the death of “the West” since the late 1800s. In his music Ian Tyson argues that the old West still lives on in isolated places such as southern Alberta, Nevada, New Mexico. His own working ranch south of Calgary might be a case in point.

For the last thirty years Ian Tyson has been singing the old classics and writing new songs about horses, magpies, rodeos, working cowboys and ranchers of yesterday and today. His music is about the beauty and the loneliness and the harshness of The Life. He has been a regular at Elko’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering for most of it’s 30 year history and he’s sung all over the world. But his concert on October 12 will be his first ever in Telluride. Don’t know about you but personally, I wouldn’t miss it.

Listen to my interview with Ian Tyson: