A Tribute to Leonard Slye

I started this blog with a post called Good Names, which ended like this:

I'm living the cowboy songs I loved as a child.

Roy Rogers is a good cowboy name.

My very favorite vacations, ever since I was little, have included a stop at a Frontier Town. There I could watch fake shoot-outs and see saloon girls and be startled by gunshots that were louder than they had any reason to be.  On a road trip at the end of the last century,  I drove the Little Cuter and our traveling mom-and-daughter companions to distraction with my pleading that we delay our arrival in Las Vegas so that we could visit the Ghost Town right next to our campground outside of Barstow.  It would only have taken an hour and I would have been so happy.  

Can you tell who won the argument? 

It makes me very glad to live an hour from the town of Tombstone, which has exactly the same buildings on its main street today as it did when the Earps rode into town.  I wear my cowboy boots and wander down the center of the dusty main street or listen to my heels on the boardwalk fronting the hucksters who are there now and who were kinda sorta the same there then.  The attitude hasn't changed a bit,  and that is a good thing.

No one knows why some of them are crested

I've been in the modern cowboy world in Benson, about 30 miles south of Tucson.  Last week I sat next to the pastor of a church in Cave Creek, where cowboys still tie their horses up to the rail in front of the saloon on Saturday night.  

There was an inordinate amount of horse poop on the trail this afternoon, which was almost the cause of a most unfortunate accident as I snapped this crested saguaro near the trailhead just off Camino del Cerro.

I'm living my cowboy dream.

yes, there was just one set up to feed 350 people

So, it shouldn't surprise you that spending the night with gunslingers and dance hall girls from Old Tucson Studios while eating chuck wagon bbq would make me smile.

G'ma and I were at the Fall Fiesta fundraiser at Tohono Chul, the desert botanical garden park and education center just a mile or so from home.  The weather was balmy and we couldn't stop smiling.

The buffet line moved very slowly, but we were too clever to be duped by rules and regulations.  Everyone else waited patiently at the tables for the serving to begin.  G'ma, her walker and I took advantage of two very comfy folding chairs right next to the chuck wagon and there we sat, she looking frail and unwilling to walk back and forth, and I sitting with my arm around her chair.  When they began to carve the tri-tip, we were the third and fourth mouths to be fed.  I'm still trying to figure out where those other two people came from.......

I'd left sweaters on two chairs and we wound our way around the gazebo and up the path and G'ma was just motoring along, no complaining, no pausing, just lots of happiness bouncing from her face to the faces of those we passed.  There was one beautiful blond woman sitting at the table when we came to claim our places, and she was glad to see that our garments were not orphaned.  Within a few minutes the other 3 seats were filled and the fun began.  Kathy the Beauty and Tim, her husband, hailed from Colorado and Nadine had moved from South Dakota to Tucson, and her brother, Bob, had followed soon after.  The six of us had nothing in common except, as the Beauty pointed out, a love of music and the desert.  We ate and laughed and ate some more.  G'ma kept up with the conversation as it swirled around from Pirates of Penzance to WNYC's radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera to the real reason we had all come out that night.

The Sons of the Pioneers, legendary singers of American cowboy songs, were returning to Tucson just for us.  They'd been regulars every winter for as long as anyone could remember and then, one day, their venue closed and they were gone to Branson, Missouri.  I choose to believe that they were sincere when they begged to be asked to return to their roots.... the group was founded here in 1934.  

And what a history they have.  Festus from Gunsmoke once sang with them.  The winner of both the Texas and The World Fiddling championships is a member of the group today.  Was he good?  He won the world fiddling championships, people.... he was great!  Other members have played with George Jones and Johnny Cash and their 3000 song catalog meticulously maintains the same sound that G'ma heard when she was a teenager, swooning over Roy Rogers, who, after starting life as Leonard Slye, was one of the three founding members of the group. 

There were silly jokes and funny little stories and The Orange Blossom Special, Streets of Laredo, Tumblin' Tumbleweeds and Just a Closer Walk with Thee before they Carried us Back to the Lone Prairie.  The bass player's prodigious belly was a character all its own, and when Ricky Boen called a kid up from the front row to help him out on a song,  well, we all just went with it.

 

Yes, the kid is holding the bow and yes, the world's best fiddler is moving the instrument against the rigid bow and yes, the music was unbelievable.  The fiddler is blurry in the picture because he was moving around the bow, dancing and smiling and generally having a grand old time.  Can you see the man in the peach shirt behind them?  That's Luther, Ricky's dad.  He's been with the group for 41 years. 

Eventually, the show was over and it was time to go home.  It was 10pm and we'd been outside for 5 hours.  We'd made new friends

We were having a totally Tucson evening, the six of us, with our walker and our walking boot and our wheelchair and each of us with someone we loved .... and each other.

and G'ma had added to her repertoire of coolness -- she got her first wristband that night

and I had a fine time reminding her of its purpose and her hipness over and over and over again as we waited for the food to be served.  There's a great picture of her surrounded by saloon girls and a cowboy who called her Ornery G'ma from Brooklyn and kept her going with one liners ... and going... and going..... but she hates how she looks in photographs and it was all I could do to get her to agree to have this one posted.  

There's just one last thing:

Did you know that Cole Porter wrote Don't Fence Me In? 

I bet you'll never sneer at Cowboy music again, now that you know that fact.

******

I wanted to add some embedded video to this post but the SotP's are pretty strict about their copyright.  I guess when you're the original you must be ever vigilant.  Click over to their website and you can browse to your heart's content.  Try it.... you'll like it.