Old Cowhands

They don’t call it country music. It’s western music. And you listen to it around the campfire, after the cows are bedded down and the horses are hobbled.

Since 1936, Buck Page and his band, Riders of the Purple Sage, have been playing the music of ranch hands. Known for their hit “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” the group will perform Saturday at the Cowboy Palace Saloon in Chatsworth.

Buck Page, guitarist and the group’s founder and only remaining original member, is quick to make a distinction about his music. “You’re either country or you’re western. We’re western. We sing about the Grand Canyon, cows and girlfriends back home. We don’t sing about the girl at the corner bar. We don’t cry in our beer, in other words,” said Page, who formed the group when he was 13.

Instead, his music is the kind cowboys played to relax their cattle at night so they wouldn’t break loose and stampede. “You want them to stay in one place. There’s always an outlaw and they won’t lay down. The music soothes them,” said Page, who was raised and worked on a cattle ranch in Lost Cabin, Wyo.

His tunes carry you back, way back--to campfires and cowboy movies of the 1940s and ‘50s. “Every little boy wanted to be Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, and every girl wanted to be Dale Evans,” said Page, who appeared in more than 200 movies and whose band performed in dozens of campfire scenes in cowboy films.

The band’s youngest member, 40-year-old Cody Bryant, of Burbank, said the music is sentimental. “It’s what I listened to as a child when everything was wonderful,” said Bryant, whose father was a square-dance caller. “‘A lot of the old square-dance music is derived from western music.”

In the 1930s and ‘40s, a professional songwriter would compose a tune, and over time, several groups would perform it, each version increasing the song’s popularity. Page and a trail of Riders have notched about a dozen million-selling hits with their renditions. “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Cool Water” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” were a few of their chart-toppers.

Long before Rod Stewart did his version of “Have I Told You Lately,” Page and the Riders were singing it to an earlier generation. Throughout the years, many groups have emulated the Riders. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead slipped one word into the title and formed a western-rock group, the New Riders of the Purple Sage. “I asked him, ‘How come you ripped my name off?’ ” Page said. “He said, ‘We thought you guys were dead.’ ”

Page went on to give several concerts with Garcia’s band. Page, who turns 78 Sunday, said he plays about 150 gigs a year and is expecting to release his fourth CD in December. “Every time I do a show, I think, ‘Hey, I should still keep playing,’ ” he said.

BE THERE

Buck Page and the Riders of the Purple Sage perform Saturday at the Cowboy Palace Saloon, 21635 Devonshire St., Chatsworth. Shows at 9 and 11 p.m. No admission charge or drink minimum. Call (818) 341-0166.