Para los puristas de la música country & western como yo, los cowboys singers son los auténticos defensores de la herencia de este género musical y guardianes de las esencias de los pioneros, cowboys e indios americanos, los que han conservado y recuperado las raíces musicales de esta nación. Ya he dedicado reportajes a Marty Robbins, The Sons of the Pioneers, Michael Martin Murphey, y The Sons of the San Joaquín. Hoy les traigo a uno de los mejores cowboy singers actuales, uno de mis favoritos, extraordinario cantante y persona: Don Edwards, que sigue dando lecciones de cómo hay que interpretar una buena canción y mantiene viva la herencia musical del oeste, que habla de tierras, gentes, sus propias experiencias vitales, y una cultura en torno al mundo vaquero.
Don Edwards no falta a todas las grandes citas western en el calendario musical del año para revivir las tradiciones vaqueras y baladas que nos hablan de auténticos cowboys. El veterano cantante y guitarrista de New Jersey es hoy una referencia indiscutible de la música western con numerosos álbumes, entre ellos Guitars & Saddle Songs y Songs of the Cowboy, que están incluidos en el Folklore Archives of the Library of Congress.

En 1993 su voz aparecía en el álbum Other Voices, Other Rooms, en la canción de Michael Burton titulada «Night Rider’s Lament«, que fue galardonado con el Premio Grammy. Muchos también lo recuerdan por su interpretación del personaje de Smokey en la película de Robert Redford “The Horse Whisperer” (El hombre que susurraba a los caballos) y por la canción “coyotes” que cantaba al final del documental Grizzly Man.
Don Edwards, brillante exponente de la mejor herencia y tradición cowboy, fue introducido con todo merecimiento en el Western Music Association Hall of Fame en el año 2005, y ha recibido dos veces el National Cowboy Hall of Fame’s «Wrangler Award» por su Outstanding Traditional Western Music (excepcional música western tradicional), una vez por su grabación Chant of the Wanderer en 1992 y otra en 1996 por West of Yesterday.
Siempre ha dignificado las canciones vaqueras del pasado en sus interpretaciones en directo y grabaciones. Alejado de actitudes de estrella, humilde, Don es un hombre agradable a nivel personal y admirado por su espíritu generoso, su conocimiento de la historia musical cowboy, y por supuesto por un más que considerable talento como compositor, guitarrista y cantante.

Nada como dejar hablar a Don para conocerlo a través de sus palabras. Él ha escrito en alguna ocasión que: “La música cowboy me dio la vida. Siempre he disfrutado tocando baladas vaqueras, la música tradicional de nuestro pasado. Ha sido gratificante saber que he ayudado a preservar esta música y las importantes verdades de esa gente que vivió cerca de la tierra. La llave a nuestro futuro es el pasado. Esto es en cierta manera por lo que nosotros estamos aquí. Necesitamos esos valores ahora más que en ninguna otra época.»
Bobby Weaver del National Cowboy Hall of Fame, en Oklahoma City, resumió perfectamente la importancia de Don Edwards al decir que: “él es el mejor proveedor de música cowboy en América hoy día”.
En 2011 hizo el 50 aniversario en la música cowboy y sigue en la brecha como uno de los mejores baladistas y poetas vaqueros. Con las botas puestas, como Dios manda.

Su discografía incluye los siguientes trabajos:

1992 Songs Of The Trail
1993 Goin’ Back To Texas
1994 The Bard and the Balladeer: Live from Cowtown (with Waddie Mitchell)
1996 West Of Yesterday
1997 Saddle Songs
1998 Best Of Don Edwards
1998 My Hero, Gene Autry: A Tribute
2000 Prairie Portrait
2001 On the Trail (with Waddie Mitchell)
2001 Kin To The Wind: Memories Of Martin Robbins
2004 Last Of The Troubadours: Saddle Songs Vol. 2
2004 High Lonesome Cowboy (with Peter Rowan)
2006 Moonlight & Skies
2009 Heaven on Horseback
2010 American

Les dejo una interesante entrevista realizada a Don Edwards por Tom Wilmes, que les permitirá conocerlo un poco mejor:

Don Edwards, 72, is known as America’s Cowboy Balladeer and recently celebrated his 50th anniversary in the music business. Deputy Editor Tom Wilmes visits with Edwards in the Western Jubilee Warehouse in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he recently recorded material for a forthcoming album that explores the intersection of cowboy music and the blues. 

What can you tell us about Cowboy Blues? It doesn’t sound like an obvious connection. 

I’ve always been interested in the old-time cowboy singers—the guys who roamed around the West and up the cattle trails. They were very much akin to the old country blues guys of the American South; of course they didn’t have a name for it back then, but that’s what it was. Most of the cowboys who played music back then were white, and most of them were from the South. So they had that sound in there by listening to black railroad workers and farmers and they adapted it, and that’s where it first began feeding into cowboy culture. Howard Odum, a famous historian who hunted traditional folk songs in the Appalachian Mountains, explains that these guys would take old folk songs and made these three- and four-phrase blues out of them. I was very much taken by the similarities between that and the old cowboy songs, which also borrow heavily from old folk songs, but I mostly kept that in the back of my head. 

Fast forward to 1986 when I gave a talk for the faculty in the history department at Yale University. After I finished my program, a marvelous, well-educated lady—she was the dean of Davenport College at Yale—came up to me and said, “I love that cowboy music, it’s so much like the blues.” After all those years of kind of keeping it to myself like I was crazy for thinking it sounds that way, she validated the connection and I said, “someday I’m going to put it together”. So finally, right here in Colorado Springs, I said I’m going to record some of this stuff and see what people think of it. 

If you look at Jimmie Rodgers, early Gene Autry, and even Tex Ritter, they all stayed very close to roots music in the early days of their recording careers, and a lot of that came out like blues. Tex Ritter did “Boll Weevil,” and “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” the old, original versions of them. 

And Gene Autry began his career singing Jimmie Rodgers’ songs … 

Oh yeah, he sounded just like him. You know, in later years [Gene] never really wanted to talk about that, and it’s kind of sad. I’ve had many a conversation with Doug Green, of Riders in the Sky, and we never could understand why Gene would not really want to talk about it. He knew Jimmie but never admitted that, “oh yeah, he’s my hero.” Never got that far. But I knew he had to have been, it was just too obvious. 

And you recorded an album titled My Hero, Gene Autry. 

Yes, that was a marvelous project. I made that record and people said, “tribute records don’t sell,” but I didn’t care if it sold. I hoped people bought it, but I didn’t care about it being a hit. I just wanted to pay homage to somebody that, because of him, I’m doing what I do today. Gene Autry, Marty Robbins, Rex Allen—all of them. The reason I got in to music is because of the music. I really didn’t care much for the fame and the fortune. I knew that it was a go-for-broke music form that almost nobody cared about, and still don’t! But to make that record for Gene, and to be able to sit in a studio with the last of the singing movie cowboys [Rex Allen] and make a record with him, that was just wonderful. I’m so blessed to have known those people. 

Can you take us back to the roots of your interest in cowboy music? 

I started to play guitar when I was about 9. We had no TV, of course, so we listened to the radio and to records. I glued on to this record my dad had by a folk singer named Bill Bender. He sang “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo (Git Along Little Dogies)” on one side and on the other side was “Roving Cowboy,” which I come to find out a few years later was written by Bob Nolan of the Sons of the Pioneers and it was Hank Williams’ theme song. Those two songs were about the first I ever learned to play on the guitar. 

My dad was a professional magician and he was also was a musician. He performed on the rag circuit, as they called it, because it was in the tents. It wasn’t the big Vaudeville houses of New York and Chicago. So he’d do his magic show at the Grange Hall or the Ladies Auxiliary somewhere and he’d have me get up there and sing a couple of songs, and those were the only two songs I knew! I learned some more songs after that, but “Roving Cowboy” has always been one of my favorites. I was influenced by all kinds of music growing up, you know the big bands—Artie Shaw, Bennie Goodman, Tommy Dorsey—and I just loved that music, but I’ve always gravitated to cowboy music. 

When did you become interested in the history of these songs? 

I didn’t have a lot of formal education, I’m sorry to say. I wished I’d had stayed in school longer and I don’t recommend it to any young people that are out there, but I did get a heck of an education. They talk about kids today with Attention Deficit Disorder, but when I was in school it was called daydreaming because most of it was boring and you wished you were somewhere else. In my case I wished I was down in Texas being a cowboy. But I had a wonderful history teacher in elementary school that would tell these great stories, and I gravitated to that. The stories were just so fascinating. 

Over the years I got to know a lot of those old folk singers and cowboy songsters like Glenn Orlin and Walt LaRue and those fellows, and they had hundreds of stories to tell. Most of them never got written down; they were passed around orally. To me it makes the song come alive if you know the history of it; if you know it came from over from England, or it came from Africa, or it came from wherever. And you say, “Man, this song is still here after all of these centuries.” And what makes it really great is that you know you’re helping to keep it alive. Even if I rewrite a verse of a song or find another verse that’s been lost or, like the old cowboy singers did, put a song back together little by little as they traveled around and hear people sing different versions of the song. I just love those stories. 

And pairing new verses with old melodies in very much in the folk tradition … 

Absolutely. Woody Guthrie was a master at doing that. He was a wonderful songwriter, but he himself said that he wasn’t so much of a songwriter as he was a compiler. He’d compile these songs out of fragments and he used all of these wonderful forgotten tunes. 

If you read the chapter “Banjo in the Cow Camp” in Jack Thorpe’s biography Partner to the Wind, you’ll find that he had a hard time collecting old songs because most cowboys only knew a piece of one here and there; they didn’t know the whole song all together. So he had to travel around all over the Southwest until he found enough verses of the song to put it all together. 

Is this what you’ve done with your Saddle Songs project? 

That was more of a songbook, but it was just enough for people to get a little bit of the background to go with learning the song, because the bottom line is you may forget the singer but don’t forget the song. [The set is included in the Folklore Archives of the Library of Congress.] It’s about the song; it isn’t about me. I’m just the messenger. 

Ian Tyson, Tom Russell, and those people rarely get through an entire show without doing an old, traditional song. Bob Dylan knows hundreds of old songs, as does Bruce Springsteen, and they all knew the stories behind them. That’s what we’re really lacking today, and I’d like to see more artists include a traditional song or two in their set to pay homage to the people that brung us all; who were here first. 

Do you have a favorite traditional song that you like to perform? 

“Barbara Allen” is one that I like a lot. It’s not a cowboy song, but it was very popular with cowboys in 1870s and still is today. I love all the various versions of it that are out there and I keep looking for different verses of it. I adapted my own version, which is basically a cross between the original version and one by a great folk singer by the name of Bradley Kincaid. Most of these traditional ballads came from Ireland, England, and Scotland, and if you go back there today you’ll hear some very familiar tunes. 

In your opinion, what makes a good cowboy song? 

Well, there’s no better place to hear the music than around a fire somewhere, or maybe on a trail ride, working cattle, or whatever you happen to be doing horseback. It really translates better if you’re in that environment. But I don’t think you have to be a cowboy, per se, to write a good cowboy song. Most of those old-time singers were professional musicians and probably never saw a roundup, but they were great writers who had a working knowledge of the cowboy and the work he does. 

A lot of writers mean well, but they’ll be too many tumbleweeds and coyotes, too many sunsets, too many clichés in a song, you know? Even back in the ’20s and ’30s there were some horrible songs that were just written for the sake of collecting royalties. But the songs don’t know about money. They just want to be saved and passed on to a new generation. 

Where did you grow up? 

I was raised up in New England in Milton, Massachusetts, and I have two sisters who both live back in that part of the country. I had a great childhood. It was back in those days when it was a lot different than it is now. My parents encouraged me to play music, and I took it to myself that that’s what I was going to do. Going to the movies every Saturday afternoon was a big thing, but probably the biggest influence to me was Will James. He was huge in the East back then. He was like Harry Potter is today and had that kind of popularity. My parents would give me new Will James book every year for Christmas. 

My mom died when she was 99 years old, and the very day she passed away she told me that she never could figure out what the whole cowboy thing was about. She said “There’s not one person in this family who even comes close to resembling one but you, with the hat and the boots and the whole thing going to grade school, you were just eaten up with this stuff.” 

And you even tried your hand at being a rodeo cowboy? 

I sure enough tried, but I wasn’t cut out. New England had lots of guest ranches that put on rodeos and there were these little sand lot rodeos around, as they called them. One of my heroes was Casey Tibbs. I was just a kid when he was a rodeo champion. He was a real sure-enough cowboy, too. But it was Will James’ stories and drawings that romanticized the cowboy life enough to get a kid really interested. As my friend Walt LaRue, an old-time cowboy stuntman and a wonderful artist, said: “You know, you read a good Will James story and it will make you want to leave home.” And that’s what I did. 

What role did Elko play in your career? 

Elko played a major role. I was doing all this music and playing anywhere I could play, but when Elko started it was like this awakening all of a sudden. It started out with cowboy poetry, mainly. The music was secondary, but it was there and it made me a new career. Without it I’d probably still be singing in bars, if I were still doing it at all. It also spawned many of the other gatherings around the country. 

How about the audience cowboy music? 

It’s an audience that the mainstream doesn’t even want to bother with because it’s less than one percent of people, but it’s such a special and loywl following. It reminds me of the old days of country music and bluegrass music. Today if you make a bad record, they don’t even know your name anymore, but a Western audience will stick with you. It amazes me that people will pick out what they pick out. A cowboy audience just hangs on every note, every story, and every bit they can absorb. 

It’s very, very rewarding for me to have had a career as long as I’ve had one, and it’s all because of the audience. The tougher times get, the further back people look. At the height of the Depression, Jimmie Rodgers sold 20 million records. So people went without something to buy a record. And now again people are looking for something that’s real and honest. 

What’s your most-requested song? Is it “Coyotes”? 

If I have one song that I’m identified with, that’s it. That song came to us while we were at Warner Western. The man who wrote it is a wonderful songwriter named Bob McDill who wrote huge hits like “Amanda” and lots of songs with Don Williams in the ’70s. When I first heard that song I said “That’s it, this is me right here.” It’s had this amazing longevity, and you never know where your music goes. People that have never even heard of cowboy music are just taken by that song. It moves people in unbelievable ways. Werner Herzog, who used it over the closing credits in the documentary Grizzly Man, said that it was Timothy Treadwell’s favorite song. 

What do you like to do in your spare time? 

I don’t really have any hobbies. I just like to do stuff. Maybe ride my horse once in awhile. My wife, Kathy, and I are collectors of mostly cowboy and Western memorabilia. We have a nice little place just south of Hico, Texas. We lived in Weatherford, Texas, for about 27 years, but it got too big and I wanted a bit more breathing room, so we found this place and we really enjoy it. I used to run a few commercial cattle but the drought put a stop to that. Now I’ve got six longhorns and eight horses, six of which don’t belong to me but that’s a story for another time. And then there’s Smoky the cowdog. 

It’s been a good life and I’m glad I’ve done it doing what I do. It’s been wonderful to be a part of all this. Being a big star or having a hit record has never entered my mind. It’s always been about the songs. I entertain myself with this guitar—I mean I play for hours working up songs and just singing. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have this guitar. People ask, “What are you going to do when you retire?” And I say, “Probably play guitar.” You do what you want to do, you know? There are no rules. That’s pretty much the way I’ve lived my life. 

Y aquí tienen algunas de las canciones que he seleccionado para que disfruten de la pura y auténtica música cowboy & western.

Don Edwards – The Master’s Call

Don Edwards – Barbara Allen

Don Edwards – The Old Cow Man

Don Edwards – I’d Like To Be In Texas

Don Edwards – The Strawberry Roan

Don Edwards | Ghost Riders in the Sky

Don Edwards – Man Walks Among Us

Don Edwards – Little Joe The Wrangler

Don Edwards – Night Rider’s Lament

Don Edwards – Rounded Up In Glory 

Don Edwards – Saddle Tramp

Don Edwards – The Colorado Trail

Don Edwards – Springtime In The Rockies

Don Edwards – Coyotes

Don Edwards – Following The Cow Trail

Don Edwards – Prairie Lullabye

Don Edwards – The Freedom Song 

Don Edwards – Old Red

Don Edwards – Utah Carroll 

Don Edwards – Boots and Saddle

Don Edwards – Cattle Call

Don Edwards – Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me

Don Edwards – The Habit

Don Edwards – Hard Times In The Country

Don Edwards – West of Yesterday

Don Edwards – In My Own Peculiar Way

Don Edwards – That’s How the Yodel Was

Don Edwards – The Master’s Call