Barbara Swartz Page 1

I think I was a cowboy in a former incarnation. It all began when my parents whisked me and my sister off to a Dude Ranch on the Mojave Desert at age eleven. It was a working ranch with livestock and chores and horses to ride. For a girl in the nineteen forties who lived in Pacific Palisades, California on the fringe of the movie industry, a frequenter of Santa Monica Beaches and a semi happy student in the local grade school, this was a dream within a fantasy within a legend. Who knew where the truth left off and the storytelling began. I'm talking about the Old West.
The Dude Ranch experience was only two weeks long but was repeated every chance we got and it pushed aside all the mundane happenings of my life. I thrived on watching the cowhand milk the cows and squirt a stream of milk at the mouths of the waiting barn cats. I begged until my parents said we could go to the ranch the week it was time to round up all the roving cattle that foraged on the open desert allo year long and gave birth in the spring to wobbly little calves who needed to be counted, vaccinated and branded. This was heady stuff, you can bet. And, if we were there, I could ride in the roundup and help the cowboys. That would represent a high point in my life.
I got to go and it was glorious!S Better than any Oater at the matinee depicted. Hot blue sky, sagebrush, cactus, and sand, dry as a bone under the horses' hooves and all those wondrous docile brown and white cattle being gathered into a cohesive herd. I was part of it, living the dream. I was way better than City Slickers!
I knew that cowboys played quitars and sang songs of their life. Often lonely or sad songs, and sometimes funny songs, all handed down in the form of multi-versed sagas of life on the frontier. Plaintive laments sung to the moon on a midnight watch with only the cattle for company.
The music spoke to me. I longed to play the guitar and I must have spoken it aloud because Dusty, the cowhand came to me one day with an old instrument, strings broken and splayed, badly in need of cleaning.
"I found this on a heap of trash the other day," he said shyly, handing it to me.
"I thought maybe it would be good enough to learn on."
I was, and it started me on the pursuit of cowboy and folk music. From that day on, although my major in life was art, my minor was definately music.
When I became the mother of two boys part of my pleasure in raising them was to impart my love of Western music. Around a campfire or at a cookout on the beach, my guitar and I were teaching another generation the songs of the cowboys and settlers of the early West.
Every little while on the radio there would be a revival of my favorite style of music. A writer named Marty Robbins wrote a song about Rosa's Cantina in El Paso that fired everyones' imagination with its dramatic and rousing story of love and death in the Old West. You could not resist singing along with the chorus and my little Den of Cub Scouts was no exception. I could see their enthusiasm and acting upon it, I proposed that our Den use the song as a basis for a skit at the coming Jamboree. Costumes and props, the whole nine yards, and we would lip sync to the words.
They jumped in with gusto and it was another high point in my life that we were a smash hit and had such fun doing it!
Then, for a long time, the curtain was down on the Western scene. Life, with its many turns and twists, took me to several other theaters, the latest of which is in Texas.
I think this theater will bring me full circle. I am back in the land of the cowboys and Western artists and at least twice a month I travel to the countryside to hear good music and eat barbequed steak. Some of these people have become my friends and recently, one friend, Louise, has been talking about an annual Christmas Party that I need to put on my calendar because I'm invited and she says I'm going to enjoy the heck out of it.
The host for this party is an artist and itinerant preacher named Bill Worrell, whose ranch on the Llano River is also his atalier where he designs and executes pictograph-like figures, both large and small. They are done in metal and each one exudesw a spiritual persona that draws you to it without really understanding why. He's well known for his work, as well as the informal and warm spirituality of his own character. Friends want him to officiate at important family milestones. His brand of Christianity has a visceral appeal to the Texas souls who have encountered him in their life and he is full to bursting with joyous good workss.
Louise's son-in-law is one of the musicians we go to hear frequently and he has cleverly solved the dilemma of being on the road all the time by developing a charter bus company that caters to the musicians on tour. This enables him to play his music closer to home and for this reason he has a happy wife and two very fine children who have the benefit of his presence and support.
The longer that I listen to his music and the stories that introduce the songs, the more I realize that it is all part of the very fabric of the early West. When he was young, Jay-Boy, like most Texas musicians, dreamed of going to Nashville when he grew up. Jay-Boy Adams is a lifelong friend of Bill Worrell and he is in charge of the music program at the Christmas Party.
Usually he invites all the participating musicians to ride on one of his luxurious buses, but this day, he must be there to arrange the sound and go over a loose plan of the program, so Louise and I were picked up by Jay-Boy's son Jason, seventeen, with steady gray eyes and a carriage that said, "I'm comfortable in my skin."
With him, for the eighty mile drive to the ranch was a very cute red-head named Blair, who also behaved as if she knew how to relate to adults.
Jason drove well, and we were very comfortable. The two kids talked easily with us, as we crossed the Llano River and turned into a washboard road. Cars lined both sides of the narrow road and Christmas lights were draped on all the trees.
"I hope dad has saved us a space up by the bus!" Jay said and he had, of course and it was right by the gate to the ranch. We joined the crowd walking toward an informal receiving line. Our host was well over six feet tall in hand tooled boots, green cotton shirt and the mandatory jeans. A cowboy hat topped a tangle of curly black hair and, best of allo, he wore a magnificent fringed suede jacket of many colors. A dynamic man, he looks fifty, but I'm told he's seventy!
Walking on into the garden, we passed a small horse trailer with the words "Heart and Hooves" printed on the side and further on, five miniature horses, all shaggy and adorable. They were calmly munching the grass while various and sundry dogs hung around and watched with noses out of joint because the little horses were getting all the attention. I'm told that it is fashionable to bring your dogs to ranch parties, but the result is bedlam.
The horses were there to aid in raising money to maintain their existance and their job in life was to visit the elderly and infirm in rest homes and such, bringing a ray of sunshine to their confinement. The keepers of the animals were there to sell raffle tickets to the willing crowd.
To my unaccustomed eyes, the crowd was a colorful mix of Texans, many dressed in full leather or suede outfits, with fringes everywhere like in pictures of Wild Bill Hickok. Others were warmly clad in layers of clothing as it was getting much colder as the sun disappeared. The most striking and dramatic garb, to my way of thinking, was the long lack wool or leather overcoat worn by some of the men. Very impressive, particularly as all the men were tall and had topped off the outfit with great felt cowboy hats.
We had been urged by our host to partake of the buffet that stood waiting off to one side of the garden. It was an offering of mammoth proportions, with platters of every kind of meat you've ever heard of and a few kinds you wouldn't recognize at all. Salads, cheeses, drinks, and my favorite table paying respect to the contributions of the Latin element in Texas. Tamales, chili, tortillas, several kinds of beans, and a succulent pot of "Ropa Viejo", which means "old clothes". It's what the meat looks like after cooking for several hours and its way more tasty than it looks.
No Liquor was served. It was 'bring your own bottle'
and I noticed the drinks of choice were beer and wine. No hard liquor. No drunks. Nice.
We ate while looking at the beautiful river through the trees. It was wide at this point, with flat rocks sticking up out of the water. All very lovely, reflecting exactly the blue color from the sky. All around us were Bill's sculptures. Mounted on buildings, stuck into rocks, and peeking out of the shrubbery. They were enchanting as they peopled the garden with the ancient spirit.
We mingled and then appearing at our side were some friends who said,
"We have saved you two chairs right up front for the music. Just go in when you get cold. It's nice and warm in there."
I will never get used to the thoughtfulness of Texans. Without making us feel like the lame and the infirm, they looked after us two older ladies with love and respect.
The building we entered was made of unpainted cement and open beams. It consisted of four open rooms giving on a central area that rose twenty feet with high windows. This structure had several purposes. It was an artist studio with art on all the walls. One ofs the open rooms was at once a chapel and a stage, well lit. The other three ells were filled with folding chairs and a huge iron stove which made even the farthest corner toasty. There must have been three hundred people inside, and they moved aside as we sought out chairs.
The stage was equipped with a sound system. Four tall stools stood at the front with a chair behind them and a small upright piano at one side. The occupants of the four stools were Walt Wilkens, Jay-Boy Adams, Spider Johnson and Sam Baker. They all four write their own songs and were about to perform their own material, each backed by the other three when neededl They took turns presenting thier songs, prefaced by tall stories and lengthy introductions, sometimes by themselves and sometimes by Bill Worrell, but either way, one got the impression that all these artists were also long time friends and that this was an oft repeated ritual that was enjoyed by everyone, no matter that they had heard it all before.
"This is a true story." one would begin, "Or at least it could have happened."
There were guest artists invited up from the audience and old friends that were introduced and recognized. They did a segment about their old high school fight songs, as several of them had gone to high school in Colorado City. They invited a woman on stage to do her fight song which, instead of dealing with wolverines or tigers, involved crawdads. It was hilarious. Another man came, seemingly uninvited to mouth a rhythmic but unintelligable group of syllables, ending with his tongue stuck out in a raspberry to the crowd. This convulsed everyone, as they tried to guess what he had been saying.
Amidst the laughter, someone extracted the work "Wahine"a from the gobbledygook and the mystery was solved. Honolulu High School!
At times, we were almost on the floor. A song called "Kissing Melissa" done by Spider Johnson told of the meeting, attraction, and seduction of a young maiden by a lecherous leering cowboy. It was delivered in brilliantly constructed lyrics, tightly rhymed, all of which contributed to the urgency of the young man's infatuation. Spider, it was revealed, was a coach at the high school in Colorado City and he also taught guitar. Jay-Boy had been one of his music students.
During one of Bill Worrell's introductions, he told of how he was a Baptist Minister as a young man. As, one by one, the other small churches in the area had tp let their ministers go due to lack of funds, he was asked to fill inl He had a circuitous route through the countryside and he told us,
"In those days it was legal to get a license to drive from age twelve, if there was an adult in the car."
He turned to Jay-Boy and continued,
"As it happened, Jay-Boy was twelve at the time and had a license, so I hired him to drive me around while I sat and wrote my sermons between churches."
Then Spider Johson turned to Bill and said,
"What about the time athat you phoned everybody to get over to that bar in El Paso to honor the tenth anniversary of Mary Robbin's passing? You said to be there at eight oclock on Tuesday night, and I'm in Nashville! Talk about short notice! However," 'he added,
"the next night the bar was mobbed with the faithful!"
The audience by this time clamored loudly for them to sing "El Paso", They, or course, had intended all along to sing "El Paso" and at each chorus, the whole audience joined in with all the breath in their bodies, lifting the enthusiasm to dizzying heights. I sat, enchanted , and sang with the rest, my heart soaring with the sheer joy of being part of this reaffirmation of the legends of the Old West.