Cowboy at Home on the Range--or on Stage

Rusty Richards’ eyes misted as he read the poem he wrote when the colt he’d raised and trained died an unexpected death six weeks ago.

Alone, I switch the light off in his stall and say goodbye.

Who made this damned old rule that us old cowboys shouldn’t cry?

Faint moonlight now is all that fills the “overkill” corral

that will always hold the memory of “Specky Boy,” my pal.

One hand in his pocket, his sturdy frame slightly bent, Richards read with the same authenticity he brought to his 14 years with the Sons of the Pioneers, one of America’s foremost singing cowboy groups, founded in 1933 by Roy Rogers, Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer.

The authenticity isn’t surprising. As Richards says, he’s a cowboy; he just happens to sing and write poetry and songs. The front porch where he stood as he read the poem is the hub of a dusty horse ranch he has worked for two decades. Foggy, his gray cattle dog, slept not far from the foundry Richards uses to shoe his mottled gelding, Traveler, who was tethered to a nearby corral, swooshing flies from his rump with a finely groomed tail.

At 63, Richards has been slowed by age and quintuple bypass surgery. He wears glasses. And there’s a computer in his kitchen that spits out his resume when the media call. But he’s still a cowboy.

“I do everything you can do under a cowboy hat to make a living,” he said, dropping his G’s. “Everything that’s honest and moral.”

He still trains horses, though mostly for friends. Last year, his cattle roping garnered a prestigious Ben Johnson Championship Saddle, named for the late westerns star. And though he left the Pioneers 13 years ago, Richards still performs several times a year. On Friday he’ll sing, reminisce about such Pioneers classics as “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” and read poetry at Irvine Valley College.

Proceeds will help send the school’s chorale (Richards’ daughter Jenny is a member) to Italy for a summer performance tour.

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Richards and Amy, his wife of 38 years, have two other children who have also pursued music. He plans to have all three get up on the stage Friday. “We did all go our own direction musically,” says Jenny, who sings pop, rock, folk and blues, “but he inspired us. He influenced us tremendously.”

The children grew up in Modjeska Canyon, a rustic enclave in the Santa Ana foothills where Richards has spent most of his life. Recently on a hazy, late afternoon, strumming his guitar out back of his 10 1/2-acre ranch, he talked about his work and sang some original material.

Using the falsetto yodel that earned him solo vocals with the Pioneers, he rhapsodized, in a song titled “Call of the Wild,” about the call of a whippoorwill, the warmth of a Santa Ana wind and the power of a raging river.

Later, he rested with one boot on, one boot off (a painful foot problem will need surgery), and noted that the Cowboy Spirit Award, which he won in 1993, also has gone to Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, the most famous singing cowboys of them all.

Richards was a tyke when he decided to be a cowboy. “I saw them at work around here. They were heroes to me.” By 16, after learning to play guitar from a neighbor in the canyon, he had his own 15-minute television show. Next came a stint in the Marines, rodeo bull riding and bit parts and stunt work on TV in the ‘50s.

When the glory days of television westerns ended, he went back to ranch life and gave singing a serious try. In 1963, the Pioneers needed a tenor, and he got the job. Rogers had long since left, but Richards says they became close friends.

For a while, Richards was the Pioneers’ chief songwriter. In 1983, he cut his only solo album and went out by himself.

Shortly thereafter, he floored some associates by suing the Pioneers for $1 million, claiming he’d been forced out and hadn’t received his share of the profits from a 50th anniversary album.

The suit settled out of court, and Richards won’t discuss it (“It’s water over the dam”). But he says he has fond memories of cross-country road trips with the group he’d revered since childhood.

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These days he sings mostly at western festivals and charitable events. He just re-released his solo album, “The American Cowboy,” a set of songs about stampedes and campfires--subject matter that separates cowboy music from country music, he explained.

“There is some crossover,” he said, “but country music is largely about indoor activities: broken love affairs, prisons, saloons. Cowboy music is about cattle and rain and all those wonders of nature.”

The Pioneers of his day enriched cowboy music with inventive harmonies and jazz influences. Pat Brady, who replaced Rogers and later became his TV sidekick, had been a jazz bass player at Sam’s Seafood, which still operates in Sunset Beach.

The band also emphasized lyrics. Richards noted that the group appeared in more than 100 films and that Nolan and Spencer worked hard to create visual images with words.

What sustains interest in cowboy music today? Sales of records by such western singers as Michael Martin Murphey have risen between 15% and 20% annually over the past several years, according to Warner Western, a division of Warner Bros.

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Richards thinks that’s because “there’s something kind of pure and beautiful about [the music], and I think people find a certain escape in it.”

(He attributes the resurgence of country music not to the 1980 movie “Urban Cowboy” but to patriotism that flared when the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran held Americans hostage during the Carter administration.)

Richards thinks it’s not enough to just sing the old cowboy songs, though. “I think we should always sing the old standards, but if that’s all we did, we’d go the way of Baroque chamber music. Cowboy music lives through the artists that write” new material. What links the old songs and the news ones is “a certain, basic knowledge of right and wrong.”

“Most [cowboys] have no problem believing in God. They believe in the creator because they see the creation. They live in it.”

* Rusty Richards will sing, tell stories and read his poetry Friday at 8 p.m. in the Edward Hart Gymnasium, Irvine Valley College, 5550 Irvine Center Drive. The program will be preceded at 7 p.m. by a silent auction of work by landscape painter B. Sanford Day. $12-$15. (714) 649-3310.