Senior Stomp : Moorpark: Seven musicians have banded together to entertain their own with down-home country-Western tunes at City Hall each Tuesday.

Kansas-born Ed Elkins leaned against a stool in front of the stage, strummed a guitar and tapped both of the tan cowboy boots tucked under his worn blue jeans as he sang the country standard “Cryin’ My Heart Out Over You.”

Memphis? Nashville?

No. Moorpark. Moorpark City Hall, to be exact.

Elkins, 82, a city resident for roughly 40 years, is one of seven seniors who have banded together to fill the City Council chambers with down-home country-Western music for three hours each Tuesday.

The band was the brainchild of Carol Ghens, who took over as the city’s senior-center coordinator in November.

“I was thinking of getting some group together so we could perhaps provide some of our own entertainment to our seniors, and to have another type of activity that another segment of the people would be interested in,” Ghens said. “The two sort of went hand in hand.”

Working with Elkins and John Burres, a Simi Valley resident who had formed a country band through the Simi senior center, Ghens helped bring together the musicians who would eventually be dubbed the Moorpark Senior Center Troubadours.

“Ed had joined my seniors band over here in Simi,” Burres said. “One day he dropped into the Moorpark Center. I guess he had lunch over there and got talking to Carol. He said, ‘We do this over in Simi, maybe that would be something of interest here.’

“So he came over and talked to me and I didn’t have any objections to giving it a go.”

The group began playing together earlier this year and made its public debut May 8 at Moorpark College’s Arts, Crafts & Entertainment Festival.

“Everything went first rate,” Elkins said Monday of the group’s first live performance. “We’ve all been down the road, so a few people standing around didn’t bother us at all.”

The Troubadours had planned to play a seven-song, 20-minute set at the festival, but when the act scheduled to appear before them canceled, the seniors were left with closer to an hour to kill, and wound up playing about 15 songs, Elkins said.

The group is composed of Elkins, Burres, Moorpark residents Clara Couch and Mario Silos, Newbury Park residents Alfred and Emogene Jacobi, and Vic Brandriff, of Simi Valley.

During a rehearsal in preparation for the Moorpark College gig, band members fanned out along the front of the Moorpark council dais and ran through their planned seven-song set--which included two original Burres-Brandriff compositions.

The partnership has produced 46 songs since Brandriff noticed Burres walking past his house last May and invited him in for a cup of coffee.

“He said, ‘What do you do now that you’re retired?’ ” Burres recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I play music.’ And he said, ‘Well, I write poems.’ ”

As the rehearsal was wrapping up, Couch stood over an electric piano and warbled the group’s closing number.

“Let’s say goodby like we said hello, in a friendly kind of way,” sang Couch, who got her first taste of country music attending barn dances in Ohio when she was a teen-ager. Burres said the charm of the song is typical of the type of music the band has chosen to play.

“All country-and-Western has a story line, it’s like reading a book,” he said. “It tells sometimes about unrequited love. I think the best thing about it is it’s slow and easy to perform.”

For her part, Ghens said she is thrilled with the success of the group, which is scheduled to perform at the city’s 10th anniversary celebration this July.

“I’m delighted with the group,” Ghens said. “They’re just a wonderful group of people and they’re making good music.”