Not so lonesome cowboy
Singer-songwriter (and artist) Tom Russell takes the stage of the Jean Cocteau Cinema with Thad Beckman
A warm evening in late June found singer-songwriter Tom Russell at The Green Frog, a downtown Bellingham, Washington, watering hole and performance space. Russell, near the end of a long tour, was there to showcase his ambitious new two-CD recording, The Rose of Rosecrae, a folk opera that ties themes of cowboy life, Irish immigration, and the frustrations of love into its lively two-hour-and-twenty-minute length. The recording boasts a large cast including a wind ensemble from Norway, a yodel choir, and a host of guests, some of them — Johnny Cash and Huddie Ledbetter among them — singing from beyond the grave, thanks to the magic of previously recorded material. But here in this venue, just south of the Canadian border, it was only Russell and Thad Beckman, a guitarist-singer also heard on
The Rose of Rosecrae. (The two will perform at the Jean Cocteau Cinema on Tuesday, July 14.) Russell told the audience, some down from nearby Vancouver, where the songwriter cut his musical teeth playing honky-tonks and other dives, that The Rose of Rosecrae is his answer to Oklahoma, Annie Get Your Gun, and other Broadway productions with a Western slant. He first heard them as a kid and calls them “frontier musicals.” He told the audience that his opera is
“Les Misérables with cowboy hats.” He and Beckman picked their way into “Hair Trigger Heart,” a rousing anthem that opens with paraphrased lines credited to Pancho Villa: “Cowboys we are, and cowboys we shall always be.” Russell sings in the voice of the musical’s lead character, Johnny Dutton, also known as Johnny Behind-the-Deuce, a “range bum” who at his trial tells the judge that he “never killed no one who didn’t need killin’!”
In Russell’s music, the old and new West collide. The romantic myths and hardscrabble realities of the lifestyle meld into larger statements of class and the human condition. Russell’s world is a place where cowboys still rustle cattle. But they also kite checks. Between sets and during a later email exchange, Russell talked about the musical’s themes and how its narrative evolved. “The story came together once I wrote the title song: ‘The Rose of Rosecrae.’ That was the skeleton I hung the plot on. The backdrops for the story are the voices Johnny hears as he travels across the West: Tex Ritter, Johnny Cash, Leadbelly, etc. He’s haunted by these voices, and it gives me the opportunity to explore the roots of our Americana music and folk music on a deeper level.” Russell has previously licensed the recordings of other singers, living and dead, performing his material. His 2007 High Tone label recording Wounded Heart of America features Cash singing Russell’s “Veteran’s Day,” as well as other Russell covers from Joe Ely, Iris Dement, Jerry Jeff Walker, Dave Van Ronk, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, among others. Elliott and Cash, as well as Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Eliza Gilkyson, Guy Clark, Ian Tyson, and other figures in the Western singer-songwriter tradition now called Americana are heard on The Rose of Rosecrae. “I used some of my older songs, like ‘Gallo Del Cielo’ [sung by Joe Ely], so I could include singers I wanted on the record. All these singers are voices I think people should hear.” The inclusion doesn’t stop at who’s singing the music. “I wanted to create a frontier musical which was coming from a more authentic place, true voices and a backdrop of traditional music that set the scene, a painted musical backdrop. We throw around this term Americana, but what does it mean? They said Aaron Copland created Americana with his ballets like Billy
the Kid, and in a way I’m following that tradition. But I wanted to extend our understanding of Americana by referencing Mexican music, French Canadian music, Swiss, German, blues, folk, rock.”
Russell has a broad background in sociology, literature, journalism, and the visual arts. His interests, even in these subjects, are more low-life than highbrow. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he graduated from college with a degree in criminology and spent a year teaching in Nigeria. His Vancouver experiences were followed by musical collaborations with singer-songwriter Patricia Hardin, with whom he recorded Ring of Bone and Wax
Museum during the 1970s. He gave up music after the two split. But, while driving a taxi in New York City in the late ’70s, he picked up Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead and was drawn back in. He shared his song “Gallo Del Cielo” with Hunter, who encouraged Russell to pursue his craft and later included the songwriter in some of his performances. Russell’s reputation grew gradually as he released a slew of small-label recordings and more and more artists covered his songs. His first folk opera, The Man From God Knows Where, springs from the immigrant stories of his own ancestors. The second, Hotwalker, is narrated by an amphetaminedriven dwarf named Little Jack Horton. “Hotwalker is a ballad for gone America,” Russell said, quoting a line from the CD’s cover. “It’s a mostly spoken-word piece about the writers I grew up reading — the Beats, [Charles] Bukowski, Ed Abbey — and the folk and country music I listened to. It really takes a shot at our so-called modern culture, making the point that writing and songwriting have gone to hell. Let’s face it, most of the great novels of the last 100 years were written before 1970. Most of the great songs as well. Art does not flow in an evolving line.”
Book learning, as a cowboy might call it, plays a big part in Russell’s songwriting. In The Rose of Rosecrae’s libretto — available in an 82-page program guide published by Frontera Press — he quotes Lorca in the introduction to “Tularosa,” a lonely West Texas ballad that drops James Joyce’s name and contains the lines, “You’ve read all the great works of literature/But you don’t know a damn thing about love, my little friend.” Russell writes regularly for the boutique Western magazine Ranch & Reata. “I’m a little bit of a historian on odd angles of Western history,” he explained. His piece on Western novelist J.P.S. Brown, a fifthgeneration cattleman and writer whom Russell sought out in a lonely corner of Arizona, is about a guy who wrangled horses on movie sets and knew Slim Pickens, but also dabbled in bullfighting, whiskey smuggling, and marriage five times. In a piece on songwriter Ian Tyson, who was known early on as half of the folk duo
Ian & Sylvia, Russell, who knew Tyson when both were scrambling for work around Vancouver, explains Tyson’s broken-spirit songwriting by quoting beat novelist William S. Burroughs. Reading these articles, lyrics, and other writings, you realize that Russell isn’t just all about cowboys. He’s about loneliness and human separation and a hard-lived life, all of which are perfectly symbolized by the men who ride the range.
Russell said his interest in all things cowboy is familial. “I grew up in a family with deep horse-trading traditions which go back to Iowa and Ireland. My father had race horses and my brother recreated himself as a rodeo cowboy in the 1950s. He’s a semi-famous stock contractor today, and he had an extensive cowboy record collection back in the ’50s and ’60s: Tex Ritter, Marty Robbins. His second wife came from eight generations of ranchers, California to Texas. All I had to do was listen to my brother and sister-in-law talk about the West — the real West — and I picked up a lot of lingo and history. The real deal.”
In addition to his writing and performing, Russell paints. His work, on display at Santa Fe’s Rainbow Man Gallery and various of his recording covers, is stylized and brilliantly colored, often in the form of respectful portraits or quasi-spiritual symbolism. He sees his visual work making a change now that he’s moved from his longtime home in El Paso to Santa Fe. “A new fresh window will open. There’s such a rich tradition of art and bohemianism in Santa Fe. The trick [in painting] is to keep your individuality and not succumb to some greeting-card world where you spend your days explaining your art and why you do it.” Individuality, symbolized by the cowboy, is important to Russell’s work. “I think art and song emanate from radical individualism. And some sort of unique character forged over a lifetime.” Or, as Johnny Behind-the-Deuce sings near the end of The Rose of Rosecrae’s first act, “I’m Johnny Behind-theDeuce/What is real and what is truth?/Trouble behind me, trouble up ahead/Pass the rum and turn the wild dogs loose.”