The Ballad of the Lonesome Cowboy
Songs:
Back to Back
The Ballad of the Lonesome Cowboy
Just A Moment
I'm Not Old
Pharmaceutic Rock
Dearest Cathy
My other sites:
The Ballad of the Lonesome Cowboy
Whether some ineffable essence called talent actually exists is a question I'll never fully resolve. My own view of music as a delightful entertainment that can be executed enjoyably by anyone is rooted in a mythic American past when families gathered around the piano of the ukelele, and simply sang what they liked all together with little thought of art or style.
As a teenager I quickly grew disgruntled with the contrast between the sweet fantasy of the hippie counterculture and the long-haired pot-smoking hoosiers who were sporting the outward trappings of hippieness without any grace or beauty. I was trapped in a mid-seventies world of popular hippieness and I felt trapped and ill-defined by it. I was also into so many things which were fringe aspect of the seventies, like the rediscovery of swing music, glitter, jazz rock fusion, and the bombastic excesses of fantasy rock.
In order to give myself a slight, ironic distance from the all-too-common hippie guitar player I was going to become, I decided to regard the guitar as a primarily cowboy instrument in order to downplay any seriousness of intent I might have been mistaken for having.
So one night, hanging out with my friend David Bohannon from Honors Art class, he urged me to learn a few chords on the guitar because it was so easy, he said, anyone could do it.
He showed me a few chords, which I rejected as being too difficult, like a G chord, which just looked freaky to the inexperienced eye.
"Are there any chords you can do with two fingers?" I prompted. He thought for a second, and then he demonstrated the E minor chord. Perfect. I tried it out. Plaintive, wild, low. I liked it.
"Sounds like the frontier wind whipping across the trackless desert sands around a cowboy's lonely campfire." I said, squinting into the imaginary dust storm in my brain.
"Have you heard the ballad of the lonesome cowboy?" I sang, and then hit the notes. "The lonesome cowboy's - let's see."
"I need another easy chord." I told Dave. He must have suggested the A major chord, and in doing so also showed me how you could add a D on it to get a nice little variation on it. It didn't do the job for me, but I made the two chords into a song anyway. Later on I discovered the chord I needed was a C major chord.
I used to love to play this with sarcasm and irony around school whenever I thought the guitar players were getting too much attention, which was all the time.
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