On Yodeling All the Way to Paradise

This one goes out to all those forty-something buckaroos who find themselves in a stare-down with the grim realization that, absent some great turn of courage and luck, the next 20 years of workaday life will look an awful lot like the last. . . . Twenty more years of pushing that paper. . . . Twenty more years of counting those beans. . . . Or, in the case of one Rick Crowder, 46 years old, formerly of Chico, 20 more years of loading delivery trucks.

Crowder was on the backside of 30, as the country song goes, and had been working for United Parcel Service long enough to know it was “not something I wanted to do all my life.” Like most everybody, he had notions and dreams--a sense that he had not been dropped on this planet to tote cardboard boxes. Also like most everybody, he didn’t have a clue about how to pursue them.

One day in 1988 he came home from a Chico thrift store with a checkered cowboy shirt, vest, scarf, baggy woolen trousers, a big old hat and some big old boots. He slipped into the outfit, stuffing the pants into the boots, and took a look in front of a full-length mirror.

“Whoa,” he said.

“What the heck is this?”

Grinning back at him was not Rick Crowder, UPS hand. Rather, it was a wise-acre sidekick from some 1920s cowboy movie, a goofy character ready to saddle up and ride across the High Lonesome with Gene and Roy, singing “Old Paint.” It was, as Crowder would come to call this new self, “Sourdough Slim, the Yodeling Cowboy Comic and Songster.” And before too long he’d be yippie-tai-yai-yeahing on the stage of Carnegie Hall, but why rush the tale?

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The reinvented life has long been a cornerstone of the gilded fable known as California. This supposedly is a place that’s uncommonly hospitable toward the idea of someone stepping into life’s telephone booth for a complete change of wardrobe: in trudges rumpled newspaper reporter, out flashes Superman, or such. It’s in good measure myth, of course, but, as Sourdough Slim likes to say, “What the heck?”

Certainly he is not one to poke holes in the fantasy.

He is a yodeling monument to it.

Crowder came to his new role with some advantages. He was steeped in cowboy culture. Born in Hollywood, he had spent his teenage years under the influence of his grandfather, who raised Black Angus steers and devoured Zane Grey novels in the Sierra foothills. Also, with his ruddy face, squared off shoulders and bandy legs, Crowder looked the part.

He left home in the late ‘60s to work as a logger in Oregon and explore the rock scene in San Francisco. He took up music, returning to Chico to play with a string band in what he calls “free beer gigs.” On stage he would contort his rubbery face in ways that made people laugh, a la Stan Laurel. This naturally comic face would become Sourdough Slim’s principal weapon--along with his ability to twirl a lariat, play the accordion, dance a one-legged jig and yodel--all at the same time.

Initially, the act needed polish, which would require much time and work. “If you only look at something as a weekend thing, that is all you are going to be,” he said Sunday in an interview here at the Strawberry Music Festival. “It’s like that with anything. There comes a time when you got to say, ‘The heck with it,’ and just go for it.”

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After a few fits and starts, Crowder finally did. He quit UPS and “never looked back.” He cringed, though, when he recalled the first time he took Sourdough public, playing on a San Francisco street corner for change. Passersby taunted him. Other street vendors accused him of killing business, shooed him off their corner. A burly biker got into his face and for several minutes gave Slim the death stare. Slim just kept yodeling.

“When I got back to the motel,” he said, “I was pretty depressed. I asked myself, ‘Do I really want to do this?’ ”

His break came three years later at a cowboy poetry festival in Elko, Nev. Slim knocked them dead, although the “real cowboys,” he said, suspected he was poking fun at them with his campy routine. One success led to the next and eventually to Carnegie Hall, where he performed in 1994 as part of a salute to American folk music. While in New York, he even wrangled a slot on “Good Morning America”: “Howdy,” twanged his pitch letter. “How the heck are you?”

Slim now keeps a full schedule, cutting records and playing fairs and music festivals with his “saddle pals,” Cactus Bob and Prairie Flower. “I was meant to do this,” he said, tipping back his hat. “And when the time comes, I hope I go out yodeling.” He has his own place, living with his wife, named Rocki, and their 4-year-old son in the little California foothill town of, yes, Paradise. Which, heck, as endings go is about as perfect as it gets.