Music Monday: The Four Mooseriders of the Canadian Apocalypse

Believe it or not, not all good music comes out of Texas.  Or even Kentucky!  The Canadian West puts out some great music of its own.  I’m in Calgary for the Stampede, so now is a perfect time to feature four acts who hail from Alberta or Saskatchewan: Colter Wall, Corb Lund, Allen Christie, and The Dead South.

Music Monday: Colter Wall’s Deadwood Music

Forget Game of Thrones.  A better HBO show was Deadwood.  (There are others better than both, but that is a conversation for another day.)  The show’s ending left many wanting.  HBO has finally returned to cap the story with a recently released movie.  Watching Deadwood: The Movie was my Sunday night entertainment.  More on my thoughts on the show ending and the movie to come on Wednesday (now up!).

Music Monday: Garth Brooks and Chris LeDoux

While I was in Texas over Christmas I caught the recording of Garth’s live show in South Bend.  Garth Brooks is, if anything, a showman.  What a lot of people don’t know is that he crafted his early shows by mimicking Chris LeDoux.  Not many artists could get away with it, but Garth shares an enormous stage presence and magnetism with LeDoux.  It was a symbiotic relationship—Garth helped propel LeDoux’s career past the rodeo circuit.

I’ve never seen Garth in concert.  But I did get to see LeDoux in concert before his untimely death, and it was everything a country music fan could ask for.

New Music Friday: Songs of the Plains by Colter Wall

This is by no means a music blog, but my Music Monday and New Music Friday posts have invigorated my discovery of new music, and I have been unearthing a flood of great stuff.  Colter Wall is very near the top of those great new-to-me artists.

Out today: Songs of the Plains by Colter Wall.

(Friday Night Lights Friday will resume next week.)

Music Monday: This Cowboy’s Hat by Chris LeDoux

There are a lot of country songs about fathers.  But I’ve got a lot of time to get to all those other songs.  Sometimes the meaning of a song is as much about you finding that particular song in that particular place and that particular time.  And this is a particular time and place—my first Father’s Day as a father, and half a lifetime since my own father died.

Chris LeDoux knew a thing or two about cowboy hats: he was a world champion bronc rider.  This Cowboy’s Hat is a story about what happens when a group of bikers threaten to take the hat right off a cowboy’s head.  A cowboy’s hat is the sort of thing that means a lot to him.  The first reason the cowboy gives is because “it used to be my daddy’s.  But last year he passed on.”

I grew up weaned on a lot of Led Zeppelin and Allman Brothers from my parents, a swallow of mainstream country from the radio, and a horn of Hank and outlaw country from my best friend.  College opened me up to a whole new world of country, and Chris LeDoux was a big part of that.  It was like nothing else I’d ever heard.  But what really hit me was that line.

My dad spent most of the last year of his life in Houston, Texas at M.D. Anderson (in one of life’s little ironies, many years later we would buy our first house a couple miles away from M.D. Anderson).  His treatments for leukemia took most of his hair, robbed him of his health, and left him with swollen feet.  When he got home he completely unabashedly rocked socks and sandals, a duck mask . . . and a cowboy hat.

So, yeah, hearing the narrator talked about how his cowboy hat “used to be my daddy’s.  But last year he passed on” hit me hard.