At Home on the Range

Ian Tyson is no rhinestone cowboy.

The Canadian singer-songwriter, who will perform Saturday night at the Fourth Annual City of Santa Clarita Cowboy and Poetry Festival, lives the cowboy life he sings about.

Recently, for instance, it was calving season on his ranch in southern Alberta, and he gave a telephone interview between trips to check on the newborns and a visit from his feed man.

“Up here on the Northern plains, when calving season comes, you’re pretty anxious about what can happen weather-wise,” Tyson explained.

This season has been mild, and Tyson’s range cows have dropped their calves in the pasture without problems. Last spring was a different matter. A sudden snow storm came up, and the calves had to be whisked from their mothers to the warmth of the barn.

The preferred method for transporting the calves is not by newfangled pickup, but by sleigh, “an old cowboy system that works pretty good,” Tyson said.

“When that calf is born, you try to put it on a sleigh, tie the sleigh with a rope to your cow pony and bring it in.”

When you use a truck, he explained, it sometimes interferes with the cow’s ability to identify her offspring by its distinctive smell.

That’s not the kind of stuff you learn in a recording studio.

Tyson, who was a fixture of the ‘60s folk scene as half of Ian & Sylvia, has always written about the West in such songs as “Someday Soon,” a woman’s lament for her wandering rodeo rider that was a hit for Judy Collins. But the 63-year-old Tyson found a new career as a cowboy singer a dozen years ago.

What started him on that trail was the same phenomenon that makes the Santa Clarita gathering possible: the resurgence, or, more properly, the emergence, of serious interest in cowboy music and poetry.

Tyson was one of the stars of the mother of all cowboy poetry festivals, held in January, 1983, in Elko, Nev., under the aegis of that town’s prestigious Western Folklife Center.

The festival now draws 10,000 people a year to Elko in the dead of winter, and has spawned hundreds of imitators. But, as Tyson recalled, the so-called Roundup Renaissance came as a complete surprise to the men and women who put on their fancy boots and went to that first festival.

“That was a tremendous revelation to all of us,” he said. “We discovered, to our amazement, that there was an audience.”

After he and wife Sylvia divorced in 1975, Tyson had all but quit the music business.

“I’d play on weekends in honky-tonks to make a little money,” he recalled. “But, for four or five years there, I didn’t write more than two or three songs.”

Gradually, he collected enough Western-themed material for a cowboy album, and, at Elko, he discovered that there were thousands of people hungry for material steeped in the sensibility and specifics of the West.

“It was a watershed moment,” Tyson said of Elko. “The authenticity was a big part of it. People could sense this was the real thing, these were the real cowboys.”

Tyson has been a big draw on the circuit ever since. He has a manager in Nashville, and he is immensely popular in his native Canada. His 1987 album, “Cowboyography,” sold 100,000 copies there and went platinum.

As festivals go, Santa Clarita is one of the quality ones, Tyson said, as is the one held annually in Alpine, Texas.

“A lot of them aren’t very good.”

In his view, the poetry side of the phenomenon, which has made stars of such cowboy writers as Buck Ramsay and Sue Wallis, is more vigorous than the music side.

“I don’t think there’s enough young blood coming into the music, in particular.”

Perhaps what’s needed, he joked, is “buckaroo punk.”

“Maybe if Alanis Morissette runs off with a cowboy . . .”

Tyson continues to find inspiration in the land, the bedrock of Western culture. People complain that the real West has been fenced and civilized into oblivion. Not so, he insists.

“We still have the wind,” Tyson said. “We still have the huge sky. We still have the violent weather.”

For Tyson, calves and barbed wire are the stuff of songs that are both lyrical and true.

“In this country,” he said, “nature absolutely rules, which is a hook line in a song I’m writing.”

BE THERE

The Santa Clarita Cowboy and Poetry Festival will be held Fri.-Sun. at Melody Ranch and Motion Picture Studio in Santa Clarita. Tyson’s concert is sold out, but he is expected to sign autographs, and his albums will be on sale, as will the work of all the featured performers. Tickets are still available for some Sun. events. In addition, visitors who purchase a $5 general admission have access to 50 acts planned Sat.-Sun. and to the Cowboy Gear Show. There is no parking at Melody Ranch. Visitors will be taken to the site by shuttle. Call (800) 305-0755, (805) 286-4021 or (805) 255-4910.