When it comes to explaining the difference between country music and cowboy music, George Clark knows the tune.
“Cowboy music is about horses, cattle drives, western towns and cowpokes,” said the president of the Country Music Plus Club in The Villages. “Country music is about drinking, cheating and heartbreak.”
Or as the late country songwriter Harlan Howard called it, “three chords and the truth.”
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There were plenty of chords and lots of cowboy truth Monday afternoon at FishHawk Recreation Center. The Country Music Plus Club presented “A Cowboy Roundup.” It featured 11 performers, at least six guitars, an accordion and a whole posse of singers, covering everything from Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to Marty Robbins and George Strait.
“This is the music I grew up with,” said Linda Clark, who spent her early years listening to cowboy sounds in northwest Ohio. “I like the idea of bringing it back.”
She performed an emotional cover of Patsy Cline’s “Faded Love.”
Big Bob Barlow, who hails from Fort Worth, then stepped up with a bright red shirt, and beige cowboy hat, as he sang about his “good old Texas home.”
“I remember listening to these songs on my parents’ old Philco radio,” Barlow said. “I mean Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys would come on and sing, ‘Wabash Cannonball’ and we’d get all excited. That music was real and people loved it.”
Back in the old days, Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers scored a big hit in the late ’40s with “Cool Water.” And these Villages cowboys showed plenty of harmony on that song and also another Sons’ classic, the wistful “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.”
Rogers left the Pioneers, married Dale Evans and became a big cowboy star at the dawn of the television in the 1950s. Baby boomers still shed a tear when they hear “Happy Trails,” which was played at the end of each show. The Cowboy Round Up crew was in top form and made some audience members long for the good old days of Roy, Dale and Trigger.
Barney Harding likes story songs: cowboy tales that spin a web of old west morality or tragedy. He delivered the goods while bringing his deep vocal tones to Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.”
“It’s a love story,” Harding said. “It’s a sad story with a tragic ending, but like the cowboys always say: ‘that’s life.’” I thought it was Sinatra who said that, but never argue with a cowpoke when he’s packing a guitar.
Harding also offered another Robbins’ tearjerker, “Ava Maria Morales.” “I like songs like that,” Harding said. “They tell a story and when they work, people really feel it.”
Turns out those gun-toting, rough and tumble cowhands had soft hearts. “All the cowboys had romantic hearts,” said Richard Miles. “Here’s a cowboy love song,”
Miles then seemed to add light to a smoldering campfire as he sang the tender, “This Cowboy’s In Love With You.”
Marv Balousek made like George Strait on “Amarillo By Morning.” Balousek has a way with a song that can make even the biggest city-slicker yearn for the bucking broncos back home.
