Acton singer embraces the cowboy way of life
‘Buffalo’ Bryan Marr was inspired by Sourdough Slim
Live each day with courage and take pride in your work. These are words every person should live by, but for a few, they are the pillars of the cowboy code.
For Buffalo Bryan Marr, a Western musician, the cowboy code and lifestyle have become embedded in his everyday life and pours out in his music.
“It’s expressive,” he said. “It reflects values that are close to my heart, you know, which are basically the 10 Commandments, being a good guy. Which is really something that I think we all strive to do.”
The singer-songwriter from Acton wasn’t always the cowboy most people know him as.
Early in his music career, Marr was a rock ‘n’ roller. He was a member of a few bands and played all over the country.
One band he was a part of was closing in on a deal with a major record label, but it ended in a lengthy legal battle after one of the band mates wanted all the writing credits.
“It was like the ultimate betrayal,” Marr said. “And so I spent the next seven years in court and I just hated music after that for the longest time.”
He ended up taking a hiatus from playing music but his artistic soul couldn’t keep him away for long.
“After a couple of years, I realized how miserable I was not playing,” Marr said.
Then one day during his first visit to the Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry Festival, he saw Sourdough Slim perform, which breathed fresh life into him.
“I was watching and listening to him sing and perform,” Marr said. “And I thought ‘this is what I need to be doing.’”
The performance woke him from his musical slumber and reinvigorated his enthusiasm to perform again.
He then went out, bought a Gene Autry book and an acoustic guitar. Not long after, he formed the Cross Town Cowboys, where he found some success.
Prior to the COVID pandemic, Marr, either in a group or as a solo act, performed for gatherings, cowboy poetry events, ranch parties and charity work
whenever possible. As things got more restrictive, he performed mostly for charity events.
“The way that I look at it, the good Lord seen fit to provide me with a very good job and to make really good money, and I have a wonderful wife,” he said. “So I feel like I need to get and give that back somehow. Because part of being a good cowboy is to be a good human being. And to be a good human being, we have to look out for all of humanity.”
By day, Marr works in the aerospace industry as a failure analysis engineer, which he describes as being like a detective.
“You have to prepare your case and have all your evidence in a row,” he said. “And have good reasons for your conclusions, which inevitably, somebody is going to argue with.”
Marr loves his job and plans to retire in the near future, which will give him more time to work on his Western music.
Around the same time as his revelation involving Western music, he also found spiritual enlightenment, which inspires his music to this day.
“When I discovered cowboy music, I also got introduced to what they called cowboy churches,” Marr said. “My very first cowboy church is where I really understood what Christianity was all about. And I wrote a song about it. It’s on the first Cross Town Cowboys CD.”
Being a cowboy hasn’t been just a musical act for him, it’s become a way of life — one in which he strives to embody everyday from a creed once repeated to him, but originally spoken by the legendary Roy Rogers.
“Being a good cowboy isn’t about hats, boots or guns,” he said quoting Rogers. “It’s about what you carry in your heart and how you live your life.”
Marr is currently recovering from knee replacement surgery and working on his next album from his home studio.