An Affinity for Plains’ Truths : Pop music: Ex-folkie Ian Tyson of Ian & Sylvia has drawn on his ranching and rodeo experiences to achieve new fame as a country performer. He’ll be at the Coach House Monday.

For Ian Tyson, finding a career in folk and country music wasn’t quite as easy as falling off a horse, but falling off a horse had a lot to do with it.

Some 40 years ago, Tyson was a Canadian youth who loved the cowboy way of life and spent his spare time as an amateur rodeo rider. His avocation eventually landed him in a Calgary hospital with a broken leg.

“The guy in the next bed had a guitar, and he couldn’t play it,” Tyson recalled over the phone Thursday from his cattle ranch in Longview, Alberta. “Neither could I, so we whiled away the hours trying to figure out this cheap guitar.”

That started Tyson on a musical path that saw him strum and sing his way to fame as half of Ian & Sylvia, one of the top acts of the early-’60s folk boom.

Over the past 10 years or so, Tyson, 59, has found a new musical life--one that manages to serve both his first and second loves. He has become a singer of cowboy songs and has released five albums of country & Western, with the emphasis on the Western, since 1983.

Tyson sings such traditional tunes as “Home on the Range” (a version on his latest album, “And Stood There Amazed,” includes two seldom-heard verses from the 1880s-vintage Western ode).

He also has written a saddlebag full of good new ones that portray contemporary life on the plains. Tyson will be performing his cowboy songs, as well as a few choice Ian & Sylvia oldies, when he and his three-member band play Monday at the Coach House.

Tyson said that rockabilly was the first music he took to after learning to strum in his hospital room.

What attracted him to the folk scene was “the economics of it. . . . If you could play guitar and sing a few songs, you could get a job in a coffeehouse,” he said.

“I became interested in (folk) music after I was exposed to it. I liked the Scottish and Irish ballads, and still do. I don’t think I ever decided at a given point to be a professional, but it took up more and more of my time.”

In the late 1950s, Tyson was part of an active traditional-folk scene in Toronto. There he hooked up with Sylvia Fricker, and in the early ‘60s they moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village, hub of the folk boom. The harmony duo quickly landed a deal with Vanguard Records, the hottest folk label of the period.

As did almost everybody else at the time, Ian & Sylvia played some traditional material and raided Bob Dylan’s ample songbook. They also helped introduce classic songs by fellow Canadians Gordon Lightfoot (“Early Morning Rain”) and Joni Mitchell (“The Circle Game”) before either was well established.

Ian & Sylvia’s best-known originals include “Someday Soon,” Tyson’s wistful portrayal of a woman in love with a young rodeo rider who isn’t ready for the settled life. Judy Collins made it popular in the ‘60s, and Suzy Bogguss scored a 1991 hit with it on the country charts.

Other enduring songs that came out of Tyson’s folk period include “Four Strong Winds,” covered by Neil Young on his 1978 album “Comes a Time,” and “You Were on My Mind,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard singles chart in a 1965 version by a now-forgotten folk-pop group, We Five (whose lead singer, Beverly Bivens, grew up in Santa Ana).

With the folk boom over, Ian & Sylvia turned to country music in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Their musical and marital partnership ended in 1975. In the years that followed, Tyson said, he devoted himself mainly to ranching and refining the cowhand skills that he continues to test in amateur competitions.

In the early ‘80s, Tyson began writing songs tied to his experiences as a cattle rancher and rodeo competitor. In 1983, he compiled some of them on a homemade album, “Old Corrals and Sagebrush,” and began to find a new following among the people who could relate most directly: what he describes as a “cowboy underground” of fans who heard him at plains-culture festivals such as the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev.

As the ‘80s went on, Tyson’s music emerged from that sagebrush underground and reached a substantial audience. His 1987 album, “Cowboyography,” has gone platinum in Canada--signifying sales of more than 100,000 copies. It won him a Juno Award (the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy) as best male vocalist.

Between 1987 and 1992, as a steady stream of new albums appeared, Tyson was thrice named male vocalist of the year by the Canadian Country Music Assn., and last year he was inducted into the Juno Hall of Fame.

With the recent U.S. release of “And Stood There Amazed,” which originally came out in 1991, Tyson has returned to Vanguard Records, his old label from the folk-boom days. He said Vanguard will gradually reissue the four other titles in his cowboy music catalogue as well as a new album he plans to record in November.

“Amazed” is a mellow, often sentimental collection that portrays the cowboy life as hard and lonely but full of integrity. Tyson’s singing is firm and clear--amazingly so for a man who will turn 60 on Sept. 25.

His sympathetic portrayal of cowboy living has little in common with the revisionist vision of last year’s Academy Award-winning Clint Eastwood film, “Unforgiven,” which casts life in the Old West as a Hobbesian competition among the nasty, the brutish and the drunk.

“It was made right in the hills I can see right now as I look out to the West,” Tyson said. “Most of the local cowboys worked on the film. I was busy with my own endeavors, but all of my albums at the local general store were bought. I guess Clint Eastwood’s people bought a lot.”

At one point on his latest album, Tyson wonders aloud whether the gilded legends of the Old West were “all a bunch of lies.”

“I think the truth lies somewhere in between” the “Unforgiven” version and the sentimentalized one, he said.

“I’ve done an awful lot of reading on the subject and have become, I suppose, almost a historian myself. Cowboys were mainly just working men on horseback. The gunfighter was a different breed entirely. The gunfighters were gamblers, and the lawmen played both sides of the street. The cowboys carried pistols because it was part of the costume, but a lot of (those weapons) probably didn’t even fire properly.

“Most of my songs are contemporary,” Tyson noted. “The bulk of them are about living in the West today (and being) in the ranching industry.”

Some songs draw upon real-life characters he has met, such as the divorced father in “Black Nights,” which offers a new twist on the old Merle Haggard / George Jones boozing-my-sorrows-away scenario.

“Lord, I could dive into the bottle, but I’m not built that way,” the song’s jilted hero declares, determined to tough out his “black nights, gray mornings, blue days” for his small daughter’s sake.

“It’s based on a cowboy I know who is a cutting horse trainer down in Texas,” Tyson said. “He’s a single parent and raised this lovely daughter by himself, which is remarkable.

“The whole thing was based on the trials and tribulations that he and his daughter must have gone through,” he said. “They don’t know” that the song is about them, “and I don’t even know them very well, but I see them at the (horse) shows.”

Other songs are purely products of his imagination.

“Milk River Ridge” is a touching tale built around a theme that Tyson dwells on frequently: the hardships of life on the lonely plains and the special difficulties the cowboy faces in finding a woman willing to brave that life with him. (Tyson and his second wife, Twylla, have been together 15 years and have a 7-year-old daughter, Adelita. From his marriage to Sylvia, he has a 27-year-old son, Clay, who he says is “a struggling musician” playing jazz-fusion guitar and bass in Toronto.)

The couple in “Milk River Ridge” “is an ongoing imaginary couple I write about,” Tyson said. “Maybe someday I’ll expand them into an opera or something.”

Right now, he has hopes of expanding his audience.

Garth Brooks, who has recorded several songs about rodeo riders and the Old West, has demonstrated how popular those themes remain with country audiences.

“Garth Brooks hasn’t done any of my songs, but he says he’s going to,” Tyson said. “I guess his father is a fan of mine and has all my recordings.

“There’s a general broadening of interest in Western music now, including the movie music, the Roy Rogers-Gene Autry era.”

Warner Bros., for example, has launched a special album series, “Warner Western,” spotlighting artists who sing about cowboys and life on the plains. The highest-profile of the batch is Randy Travis’ new “Wind in the Wire,” which was also the basis of his recent ABC-TV special.

Tyson’s U.S. profile has remained low so far: He said his coming three-show swing through Southern California will mark his first dates here since the 1970s.

“I’d like to play theaters in the United States, and the Western gatherings” geared toward fans plugged into the cowboy culture. “But I’m not interested in bus touring in the Nashville style of 300 days a year. I have a ranch to run.”

* Ian Tyson, Opus Dei and Dennis Roger Reed play Monday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $15. (714) 496-8930.

* Times Link (714) 549-9898To hear a sample of Ian Tyson’s music, call TimesLink and press * 5570