Cowboys and their escapades and tall tales have been staples of American pop culture for generations. But few living cowboy songsters do a better job capturing those legends alongside heart-felt stories of the working cowboys and their traditions and culture than Andy Hedges. With his latest album, The Westerner, the Lubbock-based singer-songwriter and cowboy poet assembled a trove of cowboy poems and songs, both old and new, which readily transcends a niche genre too often associated with bygone days to deliver a timely addition to Western music.
Drawing inspiration from beloved cowboy storytellers, especially his long-time mentor and friend Don Edwards, Hedges constructed The Westerner with an eye to the long tradition of writing new music for old poems and stories. Among others, he wrote a new melody for the album’s title track, originally a poem by South Dakota poet laureate Charles Badger Clark, and to “Pinto,” a myth-making poem about an un-ridable bronco which Hedges found in John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads and plays as a haunting, Tejano-tinged tune.
For The Westerner, Hedges assembled an all-star cast of collaborators including liner notes written by revered cowboy poet and rancher Waddie Mitchell; vocals and harmonica from Dom Flemons; backing vocals from folk legend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who joins Hedges for album closer, “Driftin’ Cowboy” (the cowboy version of Woody Guthrie's “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Ya”); and rodeo poet Paul Zarzyski, with whom Hedges co-wrote “Eight Bucks & Change” about a hapless, lovelorn rodeo cowboy.
