Ian Tyson—That Damned Ol’ Cowboy Rolls On

Ian Tyson--the old cowboy still sings and looks good doing it.

 Note--Due to sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and a touch of dreaded Blog burn-out, your scribe took an unscheduled three day leave of absence.  But I am back, refreshed, and ready to bore and annoy loyal readers again. 

It is possible you may never have heard of Ian Tyson who turned 83 earlier this week.  But then you wouldn’t be a fan of classic ‘60’s folk music, gritty contemporary Cowboy tunes—note I didn’t say Country music—or most of all Canadian.  After all Tyson’s wistful ballad Four Strong Winds was voted the Greatest Canadian song and he comes from roughly the same cohort as such astonishingly gifted songwriters Oscar Brand, Leonard Cohn, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Neil Young. That’s some tough competition!

Tyson was born to British immigrant parents on September 25, 1933 in Victoria, British Columbia and raised in the idyllic small city of Duncan, BC on the southern end of Vancouver Island.  As a boy he was fascinated by the cowboys he saw in the movies and idled his time drawing.  He was a fan of Wilf Carter a/k/a Montana Slim, the cowboy singer and yodeler who became Canada’s first Country Star.  Never a ranch kid, he none-the-less became a rodeo rider and contestant in his teens and steadily climbed to bigger events.  He also pursued art in school.

Injuries—including serious ones—are part and parcel with the rough and tumble life of a rodeo rider.  While he was laid up with broken bones and studying at the Vancouver School of Art, Tyson first picked up a guitar.  By his own admission he wasn’t very good.  He claimed to know just two chords—surely an exaggeration since most songs have at least 3—when he started playing occasionally at the Heidelberg Café, a rathskeller catering to students. 

Taken by the American rock-a-billy sound and particularly Buddy Holly and the Crickets he joined a band called the Sensational Stripes.  Within a few months thanks to Musician’s Union rule that concerts include Canadian acts, the band shared stage with the Crickets, Gene Vincent, and Paul Anka in one of those packaged tours when it came to Vancouver.

When Tyson graduated from Art School in 1958 his heart told him to stay on the rodeo circuit, but his battered body was saying something else.  Never seriously considering a musical career, he ended up in Toronto after bumming down to California and across Canada hitch-hiking.  He took a straight gig as a commercial artist but within a few months was drawn to the dawning folk music scene in local clubs. That’s where he met Sylvia Fricker, a 19 year old escapee from a middle class home in Chatham, Ontario who dreamed of a singing career.

Sylvia was lovely, talented, and more serious about a career than the restless Tyson.  But her voice blended perfectly with his rich baritone.  By 1959 they were playing together at the Village Corner and other clubs as Ian & Sylvia.  The duo quickly matured as musicians, Tyson’s guitar playing got much better, they explored harmonies, and developed a wide repertoire.  First Tyson and then Fricker began writing original material.

In the early ‘60’s not only were they good—and popular—enough to give up their day jobs and become full time musicians.  They migrated to the epicenter of the exploding folk scene—New York’s Greenwich Village.

Ian & Sylvia--the Greenwich Village years.

The duo adapted quickly and well.  They were soon in the orbit of Dave Van Ronk, the Mayor of McDougal Street and a friend and mentor to many young musicians.  It was not long before they caught they ear and eye of Albert Grossman, the young agent who already managed Peter, Paul and Mary.  Grossman quickly got them a record deal with Vanguard, the leading folk music label.  Their first album Ian & Sylvia contained mostly traditional British and Canadian folk songs, spirituals, and a taste of blues.  It was critically well received and a modest commercial success.  It was good enough to get them invited to participate in the legendary and seminal 1963 Newport Folk Festival.

It was their next album that was a creative breakthrough and a career maker.  The in addition to their staple traditional ballads, the album included a version of Bob Dylan’s early song Tomorrow is Such a Long Time.  Grossman was then also managing Dylan and their paths frequently crossed in the Village.  Tyson, like everyone else was struck by Dylan’s genius.  But he was also put off by his arrogance and tendency to use and discard people in his meteoric rise.  Also on the album was a Tyson original.  The lonesome and yearning Four Strong Winds as written in a cramped apartment just off McDougal and captured Tyson’s own restlessness and affection for Canada and its vast spaces.  The song became a major Canadian hit and popular in the U.S. as well where it was covered by numerous artists. 

Ian & Sylvia became a major touring act in both countries as well as in the British Isles and Europe.  They also sealed their professional partnership by getting married in 1964.  For Tyson’s sake they established a home in rural southern Alberta which became the base from which they launched frequent tours and worked on a succession of Albums on Vanguard and later on American commercial labels including MGM and Columbia.

Ian and Sylvia get married--1964,

Their marriage coincided with their third album, Northern Journey which featured Sylvia’s original tune You Were on My Mind which became a #3 Billboard hit in the U.S. when it was covered by the California power folk combo We Five.  Tyson also had a memorable original, a second signature song in fact.  Some Day Soon harkened back to his rodeo days but was unusual in being from the viewpoint of the girl who falls for the itinerant wild man.  It also had a swinging country music feel different than the duo’s ballads.

Judy Collins, who had already recorded other Tyson songs, added the song to her classic 1969 album Who Knows Where the Time Goes and released it as a hit single.  Collins, a girl from Denver, became so associated with the song that many thought it was autobiographical.  But the song had legs for other artists as well including Cheyenne’s singing rodeo cowboy Chris LeDoux in 1973 on an album that would recharge the cowboy genre, country music crooner Moe Brady in 1982, and country thrush Suzzy Boggus in 1991.

Ian & Sylvia’s follow up album recorded in ’64 and released early the next year was Early Morning Rain which boosted the career of fellow Canadian singer/song writer Gordon Lightfoot on its title track and with That’s What You Get for Loving Me.  The album also included songs from rising Canadian stars Steve Gillette and Tom Campbell.  It cemented their reputation as the anchors of Canadian folk music.

In 1965 they helped shake up the folk music scene at the Newport Festival when they showed up with an electric band in support of their newest album Play One More.  They joined The Byrds and the Lovin’ Spoonful as early creators of the folk/rock sound.  Bob Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo in her memoirs credited Tyson with inspiring Dylan to go electric himself despite their prickly relationship.

By now Ian & Sylvia were popular worldwide, but certifiable super stars in Canada. By 1967 they had a weekly TV program on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) where they showcased the deep pool of Canadian talent, including Neil Young.  They also signed a second record deal with MGM Records.  For the next few years they would alternate releases on their two labels with MGM steering them in a direction of a more mainstream country music sound.

In the late ‘60’s the couple actually relocated to Nashville where they recorded two albums, one for Vanguard and one for MGM.  The Vanguard effort Nashville was cut in February 1968, one month before The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and is widely considered the first collaboration of rock and Nashville session players and the first country/rock album.  Both albums included cuts taken from Dylan’s then unreleased Basement Tapes with The Band.

Ian and Sylvia, left, with members of The Great Speckled Bird.

In 1969 the duo assembled a band of all-star Canadian and Nashville side men and session musicians including Buddy Cage on pedal steel guitar, Amos Garrett, on guitar and backup vocals,  Ken Kalmusky on bass, N.D. Smart on drums,  David Briggs on piano  for a big cross-Canada rock-and-roll rail tour, Festival Express.  Dubbed The Great Speckled Bird after the song that became the first vocal ever performed on the Grand Ol’ Opry when Roy Acuff stepped to the microphone, the band was a tight, swinging, dynamic combo.

Tyson’s good friend Todd Rundgren was also on the rail tour and was so impressed by the band that he helped it get a record deal with newly established Ampex label, a division of the company that dominated reel-to-reel tape recording.  Rundgren himself produced the recording sessions in Nashville.  Norbert Putnam sat in for Kalmusky for most sessions.  Ian or Sylvia wrote all but one of the of the album’s tracks and sang lead but were not identified separately from the band on the original label to emphasize it as a separate project from their duo.

Despite being widely anticipated in the industry and the music press the label was unable to get a distribution deal and collapsed before much more than a handful of copies shipped.   Thousands of records were locked in a warehouse and unavailable as they were caught up in litigation over the assets of the failed venture.  The few copies that did surface were well ecstatically reviewed.  The LP became a sought-after cult collection piece and bootlegged tape versions circulated.  Years later some of the albums were released with stickers added to identify Ian & Sylvia as the front artists.

Promoting the Ian Tyson Show on Canadian TV as Ian & Sylvia redefine themselves as country artists.

It was not the end of the band, however.  In 1970 they became the house band on Nashville North, a country music variety show on the CTV Network, the main corporately owned competitor to the CBC.  The next year the program was re-named The Ian Tyson Show and ran on the network until 1975. 

The omission of Sylvia’s name was significant.  By then the couple’s marriage was beginning to fray.  Although she appeared on the show as part of the band and had occasional solo numbers, her husband was out front as the star.  As the program ran she appeared less frequently.

Meanwhile, their recording careers had hit the commercial doldrums with changing popular tastes.  Although established as Canadian country music superstars, American audiences still thought of them, mostly as a folk act and U.S. country music radio thought of them as interloping folk-rockers.  With both their Vanguard and MGM contracts at an end they were picked up by industry giant Columbia Records whose Nashville operation was overseen by Chet Atkins.  Despite those advantages the label didn’t know what to do with them or how to market them.

Their first Columbia LP was called Ian & Sylvia, the same name as their original Vanguard album leading to confusion on whether it was a re-issue and at the same time failing to plant a flag as a country act.  Some of the songs were strong but bland mainstream country arrangements meant to be radio friendly.  In 1972 a follow up You Were On My Mind featured a later incarnation of the Great Speckled Bird and included electric updates of some of their early folk hits.  Neither record sold well and You Were on My Mind was their last original album together. 

The next year Tyson backed by members of the Great Speckled Bird released his first solo album, Ol’ Eon which was a mid-level Canadian hit.  Shortly after Ian & Sylvia broke up as an act and the couple amicably divorced in 1975, the same year as Tyson’s TV show ended.

Sylvia went on to a successful and varied career on her own.  Her 1975 debut solo album on Capital Records, Woman’s World out-performed Tyson’s debut in Canada.  She later established her own independent label Salt Records in the 80’s and became part of the all-female country folk group Quartette in the early ’90’s with other solo artists Cindy Church, Caitlin Hanford, and Colleen Peterson.  After Peterson’s death Gwen Swick replaced her in the group.  Sylvia also became an influential country music journalist, a founding board member of the Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR) which helps finance recordings of emerging Canadian artists, and a board member for the Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammies.  Along the way Sylvia was herself a 7 time Juno Award nominee, inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as part of Ian & Sylvia in 1992, and added to the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame on her own in 2003  She was made a member of the prestigious Order of Canada in 1994.

After the break-up Ian Tyson first seemed to have a harder time adjusting.  His follow-up album to Ol’ Eon failed to chart.  He slowed down his touring and mostly retreated to his horse ranch near the tiny village of Longview, in southern Alberta, about 40 miles south of Calgary in the Canadian Rockies foothills.  He was a cowboy for real once again.

In 1980 Tyson hooked up with Calgary based music promoter and manager Neil MacGonigill.  It was a turning point to a phenomenal second act to his musical career.  He decided to dedicate himself to resurrecting the all but moribund tradition of cowboy music including the old herding ballads and yodeling songs of the 1930’s and ‘40’s but updated with original music on cowboy, Western, and rodeo themes beginning with his 1983 release, Old Corals and Sagebrush.

Ian Tyson reciving his Platinum Record for his classic LP Cowboyography

Between 1987’s Cowboyography and 1996’s he had a string of 5 Canadian hit albums and dozens of charting singles.  Along with the Chris LeDoux and a handful of other musicians Western or Cowboy music was successfully resurrected as genre distinct from Country music.  Radio station formatting the style full or part time sprang up across Western Canada and the U.S.  Although it has strong regional appeal, there are now fans across both countries and in the British Isles.

Among the singles hits off of these and subsequent albums are Cowboy Pride, Fifty Years Ago, Since the Rain, Springtime in Alberta, Nights in Laramie, and Alcohol in the Bloodstream.  In addition Navajo Rug and Summer Wages were named two of the Top 100 Western Songs of All Time by the Western Writers of America.

In 2006 and ’07 it looked like Tyson’s career might be over due to extreme vocal cord damage.  result of a concert at the Havelock Country Jamboree followed a year later by a virus contracted during a flight to Denver.  A Calgary doctor who also saved Adele’s voice, operated on his vocal cords.  After months of rehabilitation, Tyson got his voice back—but not the rich, smooth baritone for which he was noted.

His new singing voice lost some of the lower register, but added range on top.  It also gave it a gravely quality.  Tyson says he actually prefers the new voice as a better rugged match for his Western themes.  In 2008 just a year after he thought it was gone, Tyson recorded his best reviewed album in years, Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories which garnered a 2009 Canadian Folk Music Awards nomination for Solo Artist of the Year.

Other honors he has picked up along the way are his membership in the Order of Canada in 1984, a 1989 induction to the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame, a 2003 Governor General’s Award for the Performing Arts, inclusion in the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2006, and the 2011 Charles M. Russell Heritage Award presented by the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana for his tribute song to the artist, The Gift.

Ian Tyson--still a cowboy

In 2010, Tyson issued his memoir The Long Trail: My Life in the West co-written with Calgary journalist Jeremy Klaszus.  According to one review the book “alternates between autobiography and a broader study of [Tyson’s] relationship to the ‘West’—both as a fading reality and a cultural ideal.”

At 83 Tyson is still active, recording, and touring.  He is proud to describe himself as a cantankerous old man who won’t give up.  And he still looks great in a Stetson.

Fats Domino Will Tickle the Ivory on Another Plane

Fats Domino as we remember him.

Note:  Word has come that Fats Domino died in Louisiana.  Preliminary reports from a Parish coroner have been confirmed by his brother-in-law and former road manager Reggie Hall who could provide no further details.  He was 89 years old and had been in increasingly fragile health since enduring Hurricane Katrina in 2004.  A version of this post ran as a birthday tribute on this blog in 2015.

Fats Domino and New Orleans were inseparable.  He was born there and nearly died in the disaster that nearly obliterated the city that he knew.  That New Orleans was not the city of Jackson Square, the French Quarter, or even Bourbon Street, the city of tourists and romantic imagination.  His was the city under the levee, the crowded, poverty stricken, and intensely Black Lower Ninth Ward where he was born and spent most of his life.

Antoine Domino Jr. was delivered in his parent’s home on February 25, 1928 by his midwife grandmother.  The family was a native Creole—a Black French dialect—speaking family recently arrived from rural Vacherie, Louisiana.  Most of their neighbors settling in the then relatively newly developed section of the city were likewise country folk and had a culture distinct from Blacks of longer residency in the city—the mix of former Freemen and liberated slaves who had given rise to the city’s legendary Jazz culture.

The rural Creoles brought their own musical traditions built around a stew of influences including Cajun dance music, field chants, country blues, and Anglo-white hillbilly music.  It was lively and melodic with a driving rhythm.  The extended Domino family was quite musical.  Antoine Sr. was a popular fiddle player.  Uncle Harrison Verrett was a jazz guitarist.  

New Orleans Lower 9th Ward Creole cottages and street scene in the 1950's/

Young Antoine picked up the parlor piano and by his teen years was pounding out a mean stride style and entertaining at community gatherings.  It was at just such an event in 1947, a big neighborhood barbeque, where bandleader Billy Diamond first heard him and offered him a job with his Solid Senders, the house band at the Hideaway Club.  During this extended gig Diamond hung the moniker Fats on his rotund young piano pounder, an obvious tip-of-the-hat to Fats Waller.

Domino was soon not just playing the piano but composing and singing his own songs, increasingly fronting Diamond’s band.  By the late ‘40’s he was on his own with a small combo.

In 1949 Domino was signed by producer Dave Bartholomew to Los Angeles based Imperial Records, a major label specializing in Rhythm and Blues, country, and Tex-Mex music.  Bartholomew built up a substantial stable of New Orleans artists for the label and became Domino’s personal producer and creative collaborator.  Together they assembled a tight band led by Fred Kemp and featuring a strong sax sound behind Domino’s piano.  It was a fresh, new sound.

Fats Domino created a new sound with his stride piano and sax-heavy combo which came to define early Rock and Roll.

In 1950 Domino’s The Fat Man became a No. 1 R&B hit spurred by sales of more than 10,000 copies in its first week in the Big Easy alone.  The song featured Domino singing over a strong back beat with a stripped down stride piano style, a four piece sax section, and Fats scatting wha-wha in two choruses.  Sales of the song remained strong and by 1953 reached one million units.  Music historians consider The Fat Man one of the first true rock and roll songs.

In collaboration with Barholomew Domino had five gold records for Imperial before 1955, but remained unknown to most white audiences.  That changed with the release of Ain’t That a Shame.  It was his first cross over to pop hit, but sales of his original version were hurt by Pat Boone’s hasty release of sanitized and toned down cover.  Boone built his career ripping off Black artists like Domino, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry and was resented by all of them.

Fats Domino and long-time producer and collaborator Dave Batholowmew at work in the studio during an Imperial Records secession.

 Blueberry Hill in 1956 was a cover for the 1940 song by 1940 Vincent Rose, Al Lewis, and Larry Stock which had previously been recorded successfully by artists ranging from Glenn Miller to Gene Autry to Louis Armstrong.  But after Fats Domino, those were forgotten.  It sold more than 5 million copies in its first two years and shot to No. 2 on the Top 40 and remained No. 1 on the R&B list for 11 weeks.

That ushered in years of fabulous success.  By 1963 he had laid down 60 singles for Imperial, 40 of them hits on the R&B and Pop charts.  He appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and his musical performances were featured in two 1956 movies Shake, Rattle & Rock! for poverty row studio American International and The Girl Can’t Help It with Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell, and Edmond O’Brien for 20th Century Fox which turned out to be one of the most influential of all of the rock and roll movies of the mid ‘50s.  Domino also became one of the first rockers to have success with the release of an LP.

American International Pictures' quick and cheaply made Shake, Rattle and Rock! heavily featured Fats Domino and is considered an early classic of Rock and Roll movies putting Black stars in front of young White audiences.

Most artists of humble background quickly left their old neighborhoods and built mansions on the right side of the tracks, country estates, or moved to posh digs in Los Angeles or New York.  Not Fats.  He had no desire to leave the Lower Ninth Ward.  He built a large, comfortable home there, surely the most impressive residence in the neighborhood where he was surrounded by his extended family and friends.  There he and his wife Rosemary raised eight children.

Domino continued to score big into the early ‘60’s with songs like Walkin’ to New Orleans and My Girl Josephine.  But then in 1963 Imperial sold to outside interests.  He had been intensely loyal to the label and to his production partner Bartholomew and had frequently turned down lucrative offers to move to bigger labels.  But he was uncomfortable with the new management.  “I stuck with them for as long as I could,” he said, “but then they sold out.”

Domino signed a new deal with ABC-Paramount Records.  The experience was not a happy one.  He could not work with Barholomew because of the producer’s contractual obligations to Imperial.  The label insisted he record in Nashville with producer Felton Jarvis and a new arranger Bill Justis.  They wanted to modernize and brighten Domino’s sound.  They added countrypolitan choral backups and even strings to his driving, stripped down sound.  Audiences were no more thrilled with the product than Domino was.  He recorded 11 singles for Paramount and only one, Red Sails in the Sunset made the pop charts.  After two years he left the label in 1956.

The Beatles and the British Invasion were changing the face of rock and roll and leaving behind its pioneers like Domino.  Fats recorded for other companies—Mercury, Bartholomew’s small independent Broadmoor label, and Reprise.  The records, singles and albums, achieved niche market successes, but mainstream Pop success was mostly behind him.  

LadyMadonna by Paul McCartney was Fat's last charted hit.  The Beatle had written it as a salute to his piano style.

There was a spike in interest in his music by younger fans when The Beatles and other British acts cited his influence on their music.  Paul McCartney wrote Lacy Madonna in Domino’s style as a sort of tribute.  Fats must have recognized it, because in 1970 he covered it in a Reprise single, which was his last charted hit.

Through the ‘70’s Domino played the oldies circuit of state fairs, festival, and reunion reviews.  But he grew tired of the road and announced in 1980 that he would not leave New Orleans again.  The royalties from his many hits—more charted more records than any artist of the classic rock and roll era except Elvis Presley—were enough to support him comfortably in his home.  Besides, he said, he couldn’t get good food anywhere else.

Fats Domino's comfortable  but modest New Orealns Lower 8th Ward home in 1978.  Photo by old friend Michael Gaylord James of his son Jessie posing in front of the house.  Michael, who I have known from his days with JOIN Community Union in Uptown,  Rising Up Angry, and Rogers Park's Heatland Cafe, has  latey been curating an exhibing his  amazing life ong collections of photos documenting decades of activism, travel, and accute observation of American life.

Domino was serious about his pledge.  He could not be lured away even when inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or an invitation to perform at the White House.  He did play around his home town including annual turns at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and some of those Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood bashes like the one at which he was first discovered.

In 1987 he was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.  And in 1998 he actually agreed to go to Washington to allow President Bill Clinton to drape a National Medal of the Arts around his neck.  In 2004 Rolling Stone rated Domino No. 25 on a list of the 100 Artists of all Time.

Despite the accolades, Domino lived happily retirement.  Then tragedy struck. He was warned to evacuate his home before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August of 2005.  But his wife Rosemary was in poor health and he decided to try to ride out the storm in his sturdy home.  Unfortunately, the levee broke and the whole Lower Ninth Ward was devastatingly inundated.  Domino’s home was flooded and all of his belongings, including a lifetime of career memorabilia were destroyed.  For three days Fats and his family were listed as missing.  Many presumed them to be among the dead, perhaps to be discovered later as bodies bobbing in the water.  Someone scrawled “RIP Fats” on the shell of his home and photos were shown on national TV.

Luckily, a Coast Guard helicopter had plucked them to safety.  With most communications out, Fats had been unable to contact family members or business associates.  He was located among the refugees and taken to Baton Rouge where an LSU quarterback took the family in where they slept for some days on the couch and floor.  The family resided in Harvey, Louisiana during the long process of restoring his home and office which began in January 2006 and took years to complete.

To prove he was alive and to raise money for New Orleans musicians wiped out by the storm who had fewer resources than he did, Domino released Alive and Kickin’, an album of material recorded in the ‘90’s in early2006 to benefit Tipitina’s Foundation.  By 2007 the Foundation was operating out of a trailer next to Domino’s restored office.  Fat’s devoted much time and energy to the project.

Yet the staggering costs of restoration of his own home taxed even Domino’s resources.  He was also too ill to perform for some time, having to take a pass on his annual appearance at the Jazz festival in 2006.  National musicians rallied to raise money to help restore his home. 

He was visited by President George Bush who presented him with a replacement for his Medal of the Arts and his Gold Records were replaced by the RIAA and Imperial Records catalog owner Capitol Records. Fats Domino became a symbol of the city he loved as it struggled—and continues to struggle to this day—to recover from the devastating blow of the hurricane and the loss of much of its population, including many of his Lower Ninth Ward neighbors.  On January 12, 2007, Domino was honored with OffBeat magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Best of the Beat Awards held at House of Blues in New Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagrin declared it Fats Domino Day. An all-star musical tribute followed. 

Fats Domino in the favorite Fire's cap he wore to rare public appearences after Huricane Katrina nearly destroyed his whom and almost cost him his own life.

Later that year on May 17 Domino felt well enough to take the stage for the first time since the storm and performed a rollicking set to a packed house at Tipitina’s, the legendary New Orleans music venue that inspired the foundation.

Since then Domino was been showered with more honors and support, but lived out quietly with his family in his beloved city.