Western & Country

In The Blues Brothers, a waitress at Bob's Country Bunker tells the band that her patrons like "both kinds of music -- country and western." The joke is that most people see those as the same kind of music, and today we hear much more about "country music" than we hear of the old country and western label.

But there is such a thing as Western music, and while it isn't too different from what we think of as country it travels its own path. The late Chris LeDoux, a champion rodeo cowboy who started writing songs to help cover his rodeo tour expenses, is a good example. Western or cowboy music often focuses on some of the same sorts of things Western movies do -- range riding, bronc busting and steer throwing.

LeDoux was "indie" or independent before the term was ever thought of -- he recorded his first album in his friend's basement and sold them from a truck at rodeos. Beginning in 1971, he released 22 albums before ever signing with a label, which he did following his 1989 mention in Garth Brooks' "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)." Life as a Rodeo Man was his fifth album and his second of 1975.

Like most of LeDoux's self-released output, Life features several songs about being a rodeo cowboy and competing on the rodeo circuit, like "Rusty Spurs" and "Rodeo Rose." He adds some straight-ahead country covers, "Amarillo By Morning,"  "Long Black Veil," "Rhinestone Cowboy" and the Spanish-influenced Charlie Daniels song "Caballo Diablo."

Music like LeDoux's owes more to 1940's country and Western swing than to the honky-tonk or Nashville Opry scene, and it lacks any of the "countrypolitian" flavor that started to dominate in the late 1950s. There are fewer songs about cheating spouses or drowning one's sorrows and more about the lonely life of the rodeo cowboy or his faithful but rather ugly truck.

LeDoux's voice doesn't stray much from the center of his baritone range and doesn't need to -- the folk music in which country has its roots was sung by the ordinary folks during their workdays or gatherings, and his earliest music was firmly in this tradition. He sounds a little like rockabilly fireball Eddie Cochran might have had he lived and moved into the "billy" side of that genre. It's not at all hard to imagine these songs around the campfire at the end of the day on a cattle drive or at a Fourth of July picnic at some new frontier boomtown where no one ever heard of a Red Solo cup.

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Chuck Mead, on the other hand, has no problem hanging out in the honky-tonk and inviting anyone to drop in who might care to. For his second solo album, Back at the Quonset Hut (recorded at the famed Nashville studio of that name), quite a few people did. From Bobby Bare to Elizabeth Cook to some of the Nashville A-Team session musicians who backed Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves and Bob Dylan among others, Mead's Grassy Knoll Boys have a lot of help in making a record that sounds like it could have come straight from 1960.

This is nothing new for Mead, who gained some national notice as one of the vocalists for country neo-traditionalists BR5-49 during the 1990s and 2000s. Here he focuses on songs written by others instead of his own work, matching the great session workers of the Quonset Hut era with songs of that time. Mead's also been busy as the musical director of the Million Dollar Quartet stage musical, meaning he's had spent some time arranging songs and the sounds to reflect a particular period of time. Steel guitars weep, fiddles swoop, upright basses slap and snare drums shuffle along to keep razor-sharp time.

Mead's own voice matches well with the period pieces while giving them a little modern sensibility. He's always had a well-developed sense of wry -- check out BR5-49's "Me and Opie" or "Little Ramona (Gone Hillbilly Nuts)" for evidence. Here it's visible in the band name that refers to a well-known feature of JFK assassination conspiracy theories and it helps "Girl on a Billboard" and "Hey Joe" pack as much fun as they did in their day. "Cat Clothes" and "Be Bop A Lula" swerve into the rocking part of the Quonset's history and may be making Chris Isaak wonder why he skipped them on his Sun Studios record.

In the interests of full disclosure: As much as I enjoy Mead's work with BR5-49 and solo albums, I still wish he and the Homestead Grays, a roots-rock quartet from Lawrence, KS that was the best band nobody in Oklahoma City ever went to see, had managed to put out a second album, and that it had their covers of Ricky Dean Sinatra's "Head in the Wind" and Bob Dylan's "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" on it.