Ian Tyson: Musician, rancher, storyteller, and Canadian icon

Canada’s legendary songwriter releases Raven Singer, his first album of new songs in four years. At 78 this man is not slowing down

Ian Tyson walks, stiff-legged, to the centre of the stage. This is a cowboy’s gait; this is the walk of a man who has sustained his share of falls from horses large and small and who knows that the rancher’s life is not the glamorous myth of the old-fashioned western movies.

This is also a preamble to a performance of songs, new ones and old ones, for another audience who reveres an artist who has become an icon — a timeless singer with a bruised voice who tells stories with the unvarnished luster of truth.

That Ian Tyson, at 78, leads two busy, vigorous lives is remarkable enough. Yes, there’s the ranch south of Calgary, in the foothills of the Rockies, with fences to mend, quarter horses to train, cattle to move, land to conserve. And, yes, there are concert stages — from Elko, Nevada to Billings, Montana, from San Francisco to Toronto to New York to Winnipeg and Edmonton and Los Angles and — in any given year — another 30 or 40 cities.

That would seem enough for any one man, but in the first dozen years of the 21st century, he’s released four albums, filmed a music documentary for Canada’s Bravo! television channel (which has earned two international film and television awards), and issued This is My Sky, a two-DVD concert video. Two years ago, he penned a surprising autobiography, The Long Trail: My Life in the West, which continues as a best-seller— it’s sold close to 30,000, copies so far. And he also collaborated with the author of a major book on his early career as half of Canada’s first folk superstar duo, Ian & Sylvia.

And now he’s released his 14th album for his long-time record label, Edmonton-based Stony Plain Records. Raven Singer is a collection of new songs, all but one written over the last three years, that offer yet another clear-eyed example of the singer’s world view, rooted in his life in the West but informed by his travels.

In 2012, Ian Tyson is closing in on nearly six decades of performing. Almost six decades of making recordings of the songs he now writes in the 100-year-old stone building a mile down the gravel road from his ranch house. Six decades of singing stories that tell the real truth about horses and men, love sustained and relationships broken, heroes and heroines and the land and the weather and the Prairie sky.

Ian Tyson’s story is familiar to most. He learned guitar in hospital, recovering from a bad fall in a rodeo, he upped stakes from Vancouver Island and hitchhiked to Toronto, where he met a young singer from small-town Ontario called Sylvia Fricker. As Ian & Sylvia, they were the Canadian stars of the early ’60s folk boom that gave the world Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, the Clancy Brothers and the Kingston Trio.

Married in 1964, the pair made almost a dozen albums — and wrote some of Canada’s best-loved songs, including Ian’s “Four Strong Winds” and “Someday Soon,” and Sylvia’s “You Were on My Mind” — songs that have all been covered countless times by some of the most famous artists of our time, including Dylan, Neil Young, Judy Collins, and a young Canadian singer the couple mentored in his early days, Gordon Lightfoot.

During the British Invasion, Ian and Sylvia evolved into pioneers of country-rock. Their band, Great Speckled Bird, rivaled the Byrds and other groups which helped create modern country, a decade before the Urban Cowboy phase of contemporary “new traditionalists”.

After hosting a national Canadian television music show from 1970 to 1975, Tyson realized his dream of returning to the Canadian West. The music and marriage of Ian and Sylvia had ended and it was now or never. Disillusioned with the Canadian country music scene, Tyson decided the time had come to return to his first love – training horses in the ranch country of southern Alberta.

After three idyllic years cowboying in the Rockies at Pincher Creek, Tyson recorded the album Old Corrals & Sagebrush, consisting of cowboy songs, both traditional and new. “It was a kind of a musical Christmas card for my friends” he recalls. “We weren’t looking for a ‘hit’ or radio play or anything like that.” Unbeknownst to Tyson and his friends, the cowboy renaissance was about to find expression at the inaugural Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering in 1983; a small coterie of saddle makers, rawhide braiders, cowboy poets and pickers discovered one another in a small cow town in northern Nevada. Tyson was invited to perform his “new western music”— and he’s missed only one or two gatherings in the 30 years since.

He has continued to be honoured for his achievements. After numerous Canadian Country Music Awards, membership in the Juno Awards Hall of Fame — one of five such honours with various industry organizations — he has three honorary Doctorates, and is proudly a member of the Order of Canada. “Four Strong Winds,” in 2006, was chosen Canada’s #1 song of the 20th century by CBC listeners.

Life has not been without its difficulties, however. In 2006, he seriously damaged his voice after a particularly tough performance at an outdoor country music festival. ”I fought the sound system and I lost,” he said afterwards. With a virus that took months to pass, his smooth voice was now hoarse, grainy, and had lost much of its resonant bottom end. After briefly entertaining thoughts that he would never sing again, he began relearning and reworking his songs to accommodate his “new voice.”

”There was a scary night in Eugene, Oregon where a kind audience allowed me to tell some tales in a harsh whisper and gave me a glimpse of the road back through the dark woods. The songs started to come and so did the voice,” Tyson says now. “Slow, so slowly as I floated down the Colorado River, playing on a borrowed guitar with the world’s greatest acoustics to help me, I figured ÌÌhey, I can do this…’”

That first night was a harbinger of the future: To his surprise, audiences now paid rapt attention as he half-spoke, half-sung familiar words, which seemed to reveal new depths for his listeners.

The response to his 2008 album, Yellowhead to Yellowstone, was enthusiastic. Once people got used to the different voice, the new songs resonated in the same way that so many of his classics had.

Now, with the 2012 release of Raven Singer, there are signs that Tyson’s voice is recovering some of its flexibility and range.

Tyson made the record over a three-year period, as he wrote the new songs. His travels have provided the background for two of the 10 remarkable songs — “Under African Skies” and “Back to Baja.” The first is partly travelogue and partly a story of “running from the memories” of a broken relationship. The latter has a distinctly southern Californian feel and is a song that Jimmy Buffett would feel at home singing.

Other songs that maintain his reputation as one of Canada’s most distinctive writers include “Blueberry Susan,” which offers a tribute to the first guitarist he ever heard, and some of the players — Red Shea, Monte Dunn and David Rea — whom he worked with and who passed away since Tyson’s last album. “Charles Goodnight’s Grave” and “Saddle Bronc Girl” are warmly-observed songs of the real West, not the romanticized version shared by weekend cowboys and Nashville “new country” singers. One of the most moving songs on the new CD is a new version of “The Circle is Through” which he originally recorded almost 20 years ago with Nashville singer Suzy Bogguss.
And so his life continues. Tough and a man who does not suffer fools lightly, Tyson stares at the future with clear eyes and weather-worn face. Bring it on, he seems to say. Meanwhile, the songs keep coming and the stories they tell are true.

Ian Tyson is one of a kind: Authentic and durable. And not done yet. Not by a long shot.