The Long Trail: My Life in the West

by Ian Tyson

  The divorce was tough. The lawyers made a lot of money. The accountants made a lot of money. Twylla made a lot of money. And I signed all the cheques. As they say at the rodeo, I missed the short go — the championship round — again.

  As all of this was going down, four green Mounties were gunned down in the line of duty near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. This happened in March 2005, shortly after Twylla and Adelita had left for good. The killings hit the province like a hard punch in the gut, leaving people sick and dazed. Everybody wondered, How could this have happened? Those rookie officers were so young. The oldest, Constable Leo Johnston, was only thirty-two. The other three — constables Brock Myrol, Peter Schiemann and Anthony Gordon — were in their twenties.

  A few days after the killings, an RCMP inspector called me on the ranch phone.

  “Would you sing ‘Four Strong Winds’ at the memorial service?” I’ve had difficulty with that song off and on over the years. In the Ranchman’s days there were times when I’d flat out refuse to play it. I regarded it as a relic of my folk years, representing a place I didn’t particularly want to go. But I was more than willing to sing the old song on this occasion. “Just give me directions and I’ll be there.”

  I stopped off for Mel Wilson, one of my old pickers, on Thursday, March 10, and we headed north to Edmonton in my truck. There we rendezvoused with two Mounties at a south-side Tim Hortons. One of them was a woman who had served in Africa for several years. She and her partner drove us to the University of Alberta Butterdome, and as we approached the campus, I was struck by the immensity of what we were about to do. The place was packed with cops from everywhere in Canada and the U.S., people who’d come from as far away as Boston and Texas to pay their respects to the fallen police officers. I can do this, I thought to myself.

  The political dignitaries read their tributes to the fallen officers. Governor General Adrienne Clarkson expressed it well when she said, “Most of us cannot truly understand what it means to embrace a profession that always holds the possibility of danger or death. We count ourselves blessed, though, that dedicated men and women take on this challenge, sustaining the peace, the order, and the freedom that we cherish.”

  It seemed that sadness and solidarity were present in equal measure in the Butterdome that day. As I listened to the speeches, I knew my performance of the old song would be emotional. I wanted it to be honest and authentic too. I played the song slowly and mournfully, like a dirge:

  Four strong winds that blow lonely

  Seven seas that run high

  All those things that don’t change

  Come what may

  But our good times are all gone

  And I’m bound for moving on

  I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way

  My guitar pretty much played itself, and as I sang, I felt the music resonate throughout the hall.

  Afterwards I shook a few hands, Melvin packed up the guitar and we headed home. I didn’t realize at the time that my performance had been televised (I don’t remember signing a release). But suddenly the old song was back in the limelight again.

  A couple weeks after the memorial, I was riding a colt up in my round pen. It was a cold March day and I had the truck door open with the radio cranked up, tuned in to the CBC. Jian Ghomeshi was counting down the top songs for a series called 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version. The idea was to let CBC listeners pick the “essential Canadian popular songs” of the past century. “Four Strong Winds” had been nominated for the list. I was curious to see how far it would go, so I listened as he counted ’em down.

  “From 1981, ‘Northwest Passage,’ written and recorded by Stan Rogers — the number four song.… At number three, from his groundbreaking record Harvest, here’s Neil Young and ‘Heart of Gold’ from 1971.”

  My song hadn’t made the cut. Too bad.

  “The second most essential Canadian popular song of the last hundred years: the Barenaked Ladies, and ‘If I Had $1,000,000.’ ”

  I could see Lightfoot taking number one. Ghomeshi interviewed music critic Nicholas Jennings before announcing the top song. “If you don’t get goose bumps listening to this song, I think your Canadian citizenship should be revoked,” Jennings said.

  Ghomeshi continued: “This is a song that seems to have had an air of destiny about it from day number one. Ladies and gentlemen, the number one Canadian popular song: Ian & Sylvia, ‘Four Strong Winds.’ ”

  I damn nearly fell off my colt. It was surreal. The wind is howling, horse turds are blowing across the pen and I’m riding in circles freezing my ass off — and Jian Ghomeshi announces that a song I wrote in Albert Grossman’s New York flat back in 1962 is the top Canadian song of all time. The phone started ringing off the hook with friends calling to pass along their congratulations.

  I’ve been told that after my performance at the RCMP memorial, the number of votes for “Four Strong Winds” in the CBC contest increased dramatically. It’s almost as if the old song had been reborn out of tragedy.

  And then I lost my voice.

  It was the summer of 2006 and I was playing the Havelock Country Jamboree in Ontario, a big outdoor hoser festival about a hundred miles northeast of Toronto. I’d had a bad experience with the sound guys there when I played the festival in 2001. This year I was having even more trouble. It was as if they’d never heard of acoustic instruments or equalized monitors. They had the bass all cranked up, Nashville rock-and-roll style, and the rest was mud. I started shouting into the mic, trying to out-muscle the system — a stupid thing to do. I should have known better.

  When I got off the stage, I knew I’d hurt my voice. It wasn’t painful but I could feel a constriction when I was talking with Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, the act that followed us. (I believe Ray brought his own mixer to avoid the problems I had encountered.) I felt terrible, because I knew something very bad had happened.

  A couple of months later I caught a bad virus on a plane out of Denver, and after that my voice really shut down. I played some shows and tried to do the best I could, but in Eugene, Oregon, I couldn’t sing at all. I just rambled on to the audience (the people there were very sympathetic). When I got home, my doctor told me I had to see a specialist in Calgary. The specialist put a TV camera down my throat and found a lot of scarring. He basically told me, “You’re screwed.” That scared the hell out of me.

  For a while I made different attempts at rehabilitation. I worked with a holistic doctor in Fernie, B.C., who used allnatural potions from Belgium. She did a voodoo-type treatment where she hooked me up to a computer; I’d hold on to two copper clamps and the computer would come up with these coloured bars that she then fed back into the computer. The computer analyzed them and said which nutrients I was missing. I did that for about a year and then thought, This ain’t working. But now I think it was working. In any case, it made me healthier.

  These days I have a perpetual cold, a constant low-grade condition. It’s not the flu, but if you’re a singer, it’s not fun. I started developing a Tom Waitsian singing method. I had to find a way, and I slowly figured out a technique that worked with my new croaking, gravelly voice. I call it “raven rock.” The ravens living near me seem to understand my new voice. They leave in the wintertime and come back in March or April. They lived in my little coulee a few years back and then moved a bit closer, into the rickety poplar trees, before moving right into the hayshed. I was surprised when they settled that near, since they don’t usually like to live close to people. But they seem to think I’m one of them. I croak at them and they croak back, even though I don’t know what they’re saying.

  It was all very well that the ravens were fans of my new voice, but I was still unsure about what my fans would think. I didn’t know whether I should keep going with music and do another album to follow up Songs from the Gravel Road, my 2005 release. Gravel Road had been overproduced and it got mixed reviews; many critics resented the jazz mix in there and thought it was out of charac
ter. But I liked that album a lot, especially the jazz songs.

  Music critics tend to have preconceived ideas of what an artist should sound like. They want to put things in little boxes with labels. If you let that limit you as an artist, you’re making a big mistake. It’s not productive to worry about what the critics will think when you’re writing songs. If you’re going to be an innovator, you have to innovate, and realistically you can’t hit it out of the park every time.

  At this stage in the game I’m interested in doing something new, fresh and creative. I like to tell stories and I want those stories to be clothed in interesting music. On Gravel Road, for example, I did a song about bronc rider Jerry Ambler, an Alberta boy who got killed in a car accident in Utah in 1958. After he died, his Hamley saddle drifted around the West until champion bareback rider Jim Houston rescued it from obscurity and gave it to bronc rider Cody Bill Smith. Finally the saddle journeyed to the Prorodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs. It’s a real cowboy story that I chose to tell from the point of view of the saddle, but I put it to a jazz setting. It might not have been the flavour of the day, but I like how it turned out.

  Corb Lund also liked Gravel Road. He really got it. I first ran into him in 2002, backstage at an Ian Tyson tribute concert at Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary, where he played “MC Horses.” Corb is a great big, burly Alberta guy — looks like a football player — and very personable. He used to be a punker with an Edmonton band called the Smalls, but I’d never heard of him in that incarnation. He had heard me, though. His veterinarian dad used to play “MC Horses” over and over after my best-of record, All the Good ’Uns, came out in 1996. Corb got hooked on my music shortly afterwards, when he discovered Old Corrals and Sagebrush.

  In 2003 I found out that he was playing at the Bowness Community Centre in northwest Calgary, and my neighbour Pete Wambeke and I hopped in his truck — it was December, cold as hell — and drove up to see him.

  I’d heard about an Elvis-type phenomenon happening at Corb’s shows, and sure enough, when we got there the women were twenty deep in front of the stage, just like they’d been for me in Bend, Oregon, fifteen years earlier. There was a lot of energy and excitement in that hall, and Corb was very hospitable to Pete and me. He got us backstage and filled us up with booze and then asked me to get up on stage and sing “MC Horses” with him. I did, and the crowd went nuts. Corb eventually cut “MC Horses” on The Gift: A Tribute to Ian Tyson, and he did a great job with it.

  The whole experience of seeing Corb live gave me pause, because he was singing western stuff when all that was starting to fade. He’s kind of like my successor, although he’s much more than that too. He’s very western but also very Canadian. It will be interesting to see just how big he gets.

  With Corb Lund, Bowness Community Hall, Calgary, 2003. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)

  Corb became a good friend in a hard time, when my marriage was dying. He would drop by the ranch pretty regularly on his trips down to see his folks in Taber. We’d go riding or go down to the stone house, where he’d drink beer and I’d drink my wine. We discussed horses, music, American politics — and women, of course — long into the night.

  My life was very bleak back then and I was drinking pretty heavily, just trying to tough my way through it. If I had been suicidal, quite frankly that would have been the time to off myself. I credit my supportive friends for pulling me through that darkness. My friends worry about me a lot — probably with good reason — and the ones who live in the area are always calling and getting me out for a meal. But they also give me my space, because they realize I’m pretty good at being a bachelor. I don’t need to be around people all the time — never have — but a man does need human contact, and my friends have made a huge difference in my life in recent years. They’re very loyal and understanding. They’re there for me.

  A new romance also gave me hope during that period. I had fallen in love with a woman who had been coming to my shows all over the West. We starting running together around the same time Twylla and I broke up, although one wasn’t the result of the other. I was very much in love with this woman, and the way I imagined it, she would eventually move up to the ranch and we’d live together. We’d meet up at an old ranch house in Colorado. The ranch was still running cattle and horses, so it was a very cool rendezvous spot for us. I lived for the weekends when I could fly to Denver and get with her.

  Music also got me through the darkness. If I hadn’t had music, I’d be gone. But when I was in the middle of it all, I wasn’t sure if I would do another record, given my new voice. Corb, however, was adamant. “Do it,” he told me. “I like your new voice better than your old one anyway. Your old voice was getting boring.”

  He was right about that. My old voice was a good one, but I’d been around too long with it, and I’m not Frank Sinatra. After I got over being terrified about losing my chops, I found that I could draw people in with my new delivery. My croaking made people sit up and listen. I was almost glad it had happened. At concerts I’m telling stories better — because I have to. And the singing comes off well too. When I’m sitting in the stone house in the morning, I often feel as if I can’t sing at all. But when the time comes to perform, I’m like an old fire-engine horse off to the fire.

  So I took Corb’s advice and started writing for Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories. There are a lot of end-of-the-trail songs on that record. When I was writing “Estrangement” on that spring morning in 2008 and thinking of Adelita, I wasn’t holding anything back; it was pretty heartfelt and powerful. I consider “Estrangement” the best piece of music I’ve ever written.

  Now I’m waiting out the flight delays

  Waiting for the storm to pass

  Waiting for the sky to clear

  And I see your face

  I don’t think I know you

  But I know I love you still

  Somehow Adelita ended up in Huntsville, Texas (I don’t think I was informed of that fact when she went there). She was attending a farmer school called Sam Houston State University, which struck me as an odd move, akin to having all the scholastic qualifications to go to the University of Calgary but choosing a college in Prince George, B.C., instead. (Usually there’s a boy involved in these scenarios, but in this case I didn’t know the details.) She eventually transferred to Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, which has a top rodeo team. That’s a fine school if you’re a cowgirl. Adelita’s a Texan now — she even talks like one.

  We both happened to be in Colorado at the same time just after I wrote “Estrangement” — me visiting my lady, she visiting her boyfriend’s people, who live in the area. We went out for Mexican food together. She was kind of feeling me out, and I was doing the same with her. We didn’t have a whole lot to say to each other at that lunch, but at least we’d begun talking.

  I guess I hit the wall hardest around my seventy-fifth birthday, in September of that year. My friends Bob and Ali O’Callaghan kindly threw me a big party here at the ranch, put up a big tent and everything. They spent a lot of money on it, and it was a fine, high-class affair. I croaked out a few songs and people danced their brains out. Clay came out from Toronto but Adelita wasn’t there. My Colorado lover didn’t come up for the party either, which left me feeling empty.

  On the day of the party, my guitar player of ten years quit on me, with no notice, over a writing dispute. I had taught him a lot about music and life, and he had this idea that his creativity wasn’t being adequately compensated. That left us high and dry. Fortunately my bass player, Gord Maxwell, knew of a musician in the Portland area who was available. Lee Worden is a former Vancouver Island boy, like me, and he turned out to be a great guitar player, one of the best I’ve had. Thanks to Lee, we kept touring.

  When I rode at the Fort Worth futurity a few months later, I didn’t know if Adelita would bother to come, even though she lived only an hour and a half away. But every time I rode she was there, which was pretty enco
uraging. She brought her boyfriend (whose name is also Clay) with her. After my first round we all went out for Mexican food — it always seems to be Mexican food — at Uncle Julio’s, along with Bill Riddle, my friend and coach. It was very pleasant; I could see that she was making a real effort to connect with her dad.

  Riding Didgereydo at the 2008 National Cutting Horse Association futurity in Forth Worth, Texas. (NCHA PHQTQS)

  I got a letter from Twylla around this time. She’d taken off for the Bahamas, where she was in a relationship, soon after Adelita went back to school. The letter she sent me was full of regrets; she regretted what had happened, she said, and carried a sadness that remained with her. I was sorry about that, of course, but elated when I read those words, because by this time I thought there was no reason why we couldn’t be civil to each other. I sure didn’t want to be bitter anymore.

  The letter had arrived just as I was realizing that the love affair with my Colorado lady would probably never grow into anything larger. The prospect of our living together was looking less and less likely. But Adelita and I were talking again, and that gave me hope.

  CHAPTER 11

  Closing the Circle

  The ravens have returned. This must be their sixth or seventh spring here at the ranch, and the male, jet black, is almost the size of an eagle. When I went to move bales in the hayshed yesterday, I heard the faint mutterings of their babies in the nest, high in the rafters.