The many faces of a Canadian icon
By Kolya Witko
A limp hobbling his trademark cowboy saunter, Ian Tyson slowly makes his way to thehot seat. The 76 year old legendary songwriter behind Canadian staples like Four Strong Winds and Someday Soon has just finished his set at the 2010 Edmonton Folk Festival, and with a look both wry and weary, he addresses the assembled reporters..
“Okay pilgrims. Let’s get ‘er done.”
His Sunday afternoon performance went well. He closed with the aforementioned Four Strong Winds to a long, heartfelt standing ovation. I had never seen Tyson live before, and forgetting I was supposed to be there in the capacity of a journalist, I found myself cheering louder than most.
I grew up on Ian Tyson. The background music in my memories is a Cowboyography vinyl in the living room, and the Old Corrals and Sagebrush cassette in the van. As a seven year old, my best friend was a little bay horse, and my favourite song was Adelita Rose, a lullaby Tyson wrote for his daughter and an ode to the magic and mysticism of horses.
I drifted away from Tyson’s music, as most teenagers would. Yet when my adolescent angst receded, when I began to recognize the nu-metal and punk bands for the cynical imposters that they were, I found myself longing once more for the old songs, for the real warmth and the understated pain. For feelings and stories, songs that didn’t need an accompanying million dollar music video and a spot on the latest super hero movie soundtrack to elaborate their meaning.
Tyson’s career has been as unique as it has been Canadian. Born to British immigrants in Victoria in 1933,hegrew up in Duncan B.C., and spent his boyhood spellbound by the tales of the cowboy imposter Will James, thegun fighting and the horses. It was the cowboy life he was interested in- back then, not music.
“When you’re a kid in BC in the fifties you can’t imagine performing with the people that I admired. People like Roy Acuff and Johnny Cash. We didn’t dream of being able to do that. It was too far off- it was in another galaxy. But it happened.”
For a time, Tyson pursued his cowboy dreams and chased the rodeos. He cut his teeth riding broncos on the B.C. rodeo circuit. He taught himself how to play guitar while recuperating from a broken ankle incurred in a fall from a horse. Deciding that painting was his true calling, in his twenties he enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art. It was here that he began his music career, briefly playing in a Vancouver rock band called The Sensational Stripes.
“Elvis changed everything. And Buddy Holly and those guys. I played a date with them in Vancouver – you had to have a local union band. It blew me away. It was the loudest music I’d ever heard in my life. It was great, but we didn’t know the whole world was gonna change.”
He graduatedfrom art school in 1958 and hitch hiked to Toronto where he accepted a job as a commercial artist.The painting career faded as his music blossomed but the desire to paint remains.
“Many years after art school, when I got my ranch, I painted and I’m going to go back to it,” he says,“I like Maynard Dixon, Charlie Russell, all the great cowboys. I’m going to paint mountain ram skulls, like Georgia O’Keefe. Which is strange because I’m not a fan of Georgia O’Keefe. She was a weird lady. But we’re all weird. I’m going to do the Ian Tyson version of Georgia O’Keefe. It’ll probably never happen – I don’t have enough time left.”
Tyson broke into the fledgling folk music scene in Toronto in the late fifties, before anyone had ever heard of Bob Dylan. In 1959, he met Sylvia Fricker, and soon the two began performing in Toronto coffee houses as Ian & Sylvia. Within a few years, they had shifted their base to Greenwich Village in New York, quickly rising to the top of the booming folk wave, in the class of Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger. They played Newport, and sold out Carnegie Hall (twice), winning over crowds with classics like Someday Soon.
One of the headliners at this year’s festival is Bob’s son Jakob Dylan. Tyson took some time to share tales of his father in the sixties.
“I think Bob Dylan’s a genius. He’s been an influence on me. I mean, when we were all together in Greenwich Village, he was just a little shit from Minnesota. He was a pain in the ass. But he didn’t care. Looking back, he knew how to do it. He had it all figured out. He just went for it.”
By the mid sixties, Tyson and Fricker’s relationship had developed from professional to personal, and they married in 1964. But folk was stagnating and Tyson found himself becoming disillusioned with the increasingly fervent political element of the scene, and growing disinterested in the music itself. By the time the Beatles invaded in 1964, the writing was on the wall, and he slowly began to withdraw.
Crowded city life and the business aspects of music brought about a longing for respite. He bought a farm, some horses and cattle outside Toronto, and started spending less time touring. Sylvia gave birth to a son, Clay, and the disintinigration of their careers before the new rock n’ roll onslaught, coupled with bringing a young child on tour, began to take a toll on the marriage.
I have lived in the city for eight years now, in apartments in the downtown core for the last four. I doubt I look much like a country boy anymore, and only rarely act like one. It’s a life I have chosen and one that I enjoy mostly, but I can never stay too long. After a couple of weeks the city seems to itch, and I find myself longing for air and space. You can’t sit on a tailgate with a case of beer here, or really howl at the moon. It sometimes seems you can’t do much of anything without a permit. And still the neighbours will complain
Popular folk music was dying. Dylan had famously gone electric and moved to Nashville. The prolific, tragic Gram Parsons had introduced the Byrds and, more significantly, the Rolling Stones to western twang and country-rock was born. Tyson, stepping tentatively toward a return to his western roots, wanted in. Along with Sylvia and some established Nashville musicians, he formed The Great Speckled Bird. They produced two albums, still well regarded but commercial failures nonetheless. The Great Speckled Bird never did find its feet.
By 1969 he was hosting a television show for CTV. Originally billed “Nashville North,” it quickly became “The Ian Tyson Show,” and Tyson used it as a forum to promote country music and keep his struggling band going. His marriage effectively over, unhappy with his career, and increasingly bitter toward the industry, he would retreat to his farm, to his cattle, and even more so, his horses.
He abruptly quit the television show after three years, and with some difficulty due to an earlier marijuana conviction, moved to Nashville for one last kick at mainstream country. He didn’t stay long. The “Outlaw” country movement wasn’t so outlaw. He never could schmooze, didn’t fit in, and nobody was interested. He returned to Toronto, but only briefly.
“I think you’ve gotta be ready to sell pieces of your soul,” he says,“If you’re a solo act, that can be a lonely, lonely gig. You’ve either gotta be super strong, or nuts. Most of them are nuts.”
Tyson was in his forties and seemingly washed up as an artist. He was tired of Toronto and resolved to transplant to either Texas or Alberta. Immigration difficulties ruled out Texas (a fact for which he was later grateful) so he sold his farm and headed to Calgary.
Besides the odd show in Alberta or Saskatchewan, he was out of the music business. He made a weak comeback attempt fronting a band called Northwest Rebellion that never amounted to much. He and Sylvia divorced.
In 1978 Neil Young recorded Four Strong Winds. Tyson put the massive royalties into a ranch, the T-Bar-Y, which he still owns and operates today.
He was playing several weeks a year at the Ranchman’s, a Calgary club, mixing country standards with a sprinkling of original material. Calgary was in the throes of the great seventies oil boom, and the big money led to hard drinking and brawling, Tyson doing his best to hold up his end.
It was at the Ranchman’s that Tyson met Twylla Biblow, a teenager less than half his age. Still, she was horse crazy like him, and the two fell in love, inspiring his song Nobody Thought It Would. She soon joined him at the T-Bar-Y.
By the early 1980s, Tyson was feeling the prickling need to write. He shifted away from the tenor of his folk singing days to a more natural baritone, developing the clear, ringing voice he would become known and praised for.
“If you write a couple of lines that are really powerful, the music will attach itself to that. “
He recorded the Old Corrals and Sagebrush album in his house with no expectations. He called it western music, cowboy music, eschewing the eastern hillbilly roots of modern country. The record escaped widespread notice but suddenly Tyson was again resurrecting his career.
Another record, simply titled Ian Tyson and once again recorded at home, followed. It was released by Columbia Records, who quickly dropped him due to the album’s perceived lack of success. But something had started. The cowboys, at least, were listening, and Tyson felt he had finally found his true calling.
In 1986 Tyson released Cowboyography on his own label, with the financing provided by friends. Stony Plain Records eventually picked up distribution, and it would be his biggest release and went platinum.
That same year, Tyson and Twylla wed, following the birth of their daughter, Adelita.Around this time Tyson became involved in the “cowboy poetry” community, the centre of which was the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. A traditional western revival or “Cowboy Renaissance,” with Tyson helping to lead it, was well underway.
He released two more albums, I Outgrew the Wagon and And Stood There Amazed, though was developing a small, creeping resentment toward the movement. He had set out to write songs for cowboys, and now various bagmen and posers were trying to horn in, tainting the authenticity.
When I go home now, I can’t help but notice with a touch of resentment all the new houses springing up along our old gravel roads. I tell myself that my own family are recent interlopers, invaders from rural Manitoba and urban Ontario. It only barely helps.
But for his next album, he was once again on a label, and recording in Nashville. Eighteen Inches of Rain was a critical and modest commercial success.
Through the 1990s and most of the first decade of the new millennium, Tyson continued to produce. A greatest hits album All the Good ‘Uns and a live one Live At Longview complimented two records of new material – Lost Herd (1999), and Songs from the Gravel Road (2005). On both albums, Tyson maintained his cowboy themes, though he also introduced new influences, such as jazz.
Lost Herd and Songs from the Gravel Road were a hit with critics, but failed to move many copies. The music world was changing again, and Tyson was finding himself on the outside once more. He did score a minor hit with a 2005 duet with Alberta country darling Corb Lund called The Rodeo’s Over. This partnership, and more importantly the friendship, would prove vital.
Songs from the Gravel Road contained several songs of broken love. His marriage with Twylla was collapsing, though they wouldn’t officially divorce until 2008.
People could be forgiven for thinking Tyson finished. With the advent of file sharing, everyone was in trouble, though this probably wasn’t affecting his sales very much. Breaking into the mainstream was, and is still, a challenge.
“I get no radio play in Alberta. If I get some really good songs, I guess I’ll make it in the house. There’s got to be a way to get out there. The record companies don’t know how to do it. It’s nobody’s fault – we’re just waiting for the next thing. No one knows what the next thing is.”
In 2006, Tyson strained his voice at the Havelock Jamboree in Ontario. A virus a year later caused further damage, causing irreversible vocal scarring and all but destroying his famous sound. “The Man with the Golden Voice” was now confined to a relative whisper.
“It scared me big time. I tried to muscle it, which is the worst thing you can do, and I tried to sing louder, and it just shut down completely. It just stopped.”
“I didn’t know what to do. I just said, ‘I gotta get a plan, I gotta figure something out.’ I was coming out of a divorce, I owed big money. I went back to the ranch and tried to figure out what the options were.”
A chat with his good friend Corb Lund reassured him. Lund told him that he liked the “new” voice and Tyson resolved to keep going.
The result was 2008’s From Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories. The wide, warm voice was gone, replaced by this hoarse whisper that could express the pain, loss, and yearning of his songs like never before. Critics raved at the poignancy of his new voice and it was his best selling album in years. The title track was the story of a wolf pack transplanted from Jasper to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. It was solid, heartbreaking, vintage Tyson.
I heard a coyote calling down in the river valley the other night and, my deadline looming, thought of Ian Tyson.
One of Tyson’s many interesting quirks – and frequent subject of his songs – is his fondness for two of the West’s wilier misfits- the coyote and the magpie. Mangy pests to most of his farming and ranching acolytes, he sings of them as misunderstood- romantic, brave, and lonely foragers in a harsh land.
“I do what I do. I do my job the best I know how to,” he says,“I’ve been an outsider my whole career. I’ll be an outsider until the day I die.”
“People tell me ‘Tyson, you’re always longing for the old days.’ And they’re right, that’s true – I live in the past. And it was way better.”
“My gift is that I was born in the early 1930s, and I was fortunate enough to be raised in a time when you could be a painter, you could be a singer. It was wonderful. Back then, if you didn’t like your job, you quit, and you went 14 miles down the road and you got another job, no problem. You could be a painter, you could be singer, you could be a guitar player.”
Judging from his matinee audience, he isn’t the only one with a soft spot for the old days.
The crowd is eclectic, like most Folk Fest shows. The interested, if uninitiated, bob their heads and clap their hands, while the diehards either sing along or sit silentl and reverently, missing no sad note, no haunting verse. Tyson cuts the set short at about 45 minutes. The forgiving audience doesn’t seem to mind, cheering wildly, maybe half hoping for an encore or simply grateful for one more chance to see and hear the lonely old cowboy troubadour in person.
“That’s why I wanted to be here, and that’s why I wanted to be in Calgary. I can go back to my little cow towns in Wyoming. I love those people. You gotta bring them along, tell them a new story. But today is pretty special for me.”
I never rode much after that bay pony died. A few years ago, I was in Jackson’s Hole, Wyoming with my girlfriend, and on an impulse we rented a couple of horses and rode out into the mountains for the day. We wandered the trails, eating lunch in a little valley and napping beneath Ponderosa pine to the sound of our horses chomping grass. For a few hours, I was a kid again, free of want or worry, the lost wonder for horses of so long ago recaptured. And sure enough, a few days later, down the highway in Cody, the town named after Buffalo Bill, we found a dingy souvenir shop with copies of Old Corrals and Sagebrush and Cowboyography. Our old borrowed van only had a tape deck, but of course it being Wyoming and Ian Tyson, they stocked cassettes.
Tonight Four Strong Winds, which was voted by CBC listeners as the greatest Canadian song of the century, is slated to be sung by 20,000 people to close out the festival. An honour certainly, but Tyson feels his ownership of the song is now dubious.
“Four Strong Winds doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s gone somewhere else, and that’s not to denigrate it but it belongs to the country now. Like the Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love or Johnny Cash with I Walk the Line. Those songs go somewhere else. They go out the door and they’re gone. You still get the cheques, though.“
Tyson has been covered by Cash, and Neil Young, Sarah McLachlan, Jann Arden, and Judy Collins, among many others.
“I love hearing other artists’ interpretations of my songs. As long as they go somewhere else with it.”
Being a singer-songwriter in his seventies, with an autobiography, The Long Road, released in October, nostalgia is a topic cropping up frequently .
“Why I wrote it? Money. I’m a rancher,” he laughs, “Once it got written it was a lot of fun. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read it. If you’re crazy about horses it’s okay, and if you want to learn about Greenwich Village in the sixties it’s okay, but other than that I don’t know why anyone would want to read it.”
Yet even at age 76, he feels he can contribute.
“I’m not a nostalgia act, and I don’t want to be. If they’re billing me as a nostalgia act, I ain’t gonna be there,” he glares at us as though we doubt him,“I’m going to be writing what I write until the end.”
“I know how to write songs. Corb Lund knows how to write songs. This is going to sound rather Steinbeck, but we’re the children of the Alberta sod. And it’s important that we do what we do.”
To me, Tyson represents not only a bridge to the romance of a vanishing, almost unattainable culture, but to my own past, and his lonesome, yearning voice a solid reminder of the fact that the tie to the ground on which I stand and live now, no matter how much I try to ignore it, is far weaker than the knot to the land I really know, and really love.
My apartment is hot tonight, and the street bikes roaring up the hill on 105th are starting to seem like a constant buzz in my head. If you see me tomorrow, it will be in a pickup truck, flying down a gravel road, chased by a long trail of dust, with Ian Tyson’s Alberta’s Child on the stereo.