Singer Ian Tyson rides tall in saddle

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This article was published 23/10/2010 (5791 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Long Trail: My Life in the West

By Ian Tyson

Random House Canada, 197 pages, $30

 

AS Canadian living legends go, Ian Tyson rides tall in the saddle. The Victoria-born singer-songwriter and cowboy raconteur has been a mainstay on the Canadian music scene since the late 1950s and at age 77 is still feisty and outspoken, if a bit mellower.

The Long Trail is Tyson’s second run at an autobiography. In 1993, I Never Sold My Saddle was criticized for its sparse coverage of the Ian & Sylvia years as well as Tyson’s Alberta-style right-wing political bent. His new book updates the story while suffering the same flaws, although in the first instance intentionally so, as both he and ex-wife Sylvia Tyson have co-operated on an Ian & Sylvia biography to be published next year.

Nonetheless, despite primarily focusing on ranch life and raising horses, Tyson still manages to spin an engaging tale in this slim volume.

Growing up on Vancouver Island, the second child of well-heeled gentry, Tyson fell in love with horses long before he ever picked up a guitar. The Wild West adventures of Canadian-born writer Will James stirred in the young lad dreams of one day being a cowboy.

A turbulent relationship with his father led Tyson to leave home in his teens for the wilds of the B.C. and Alberta interiors, working weekdays in the forests while rodeo riding on weekends.

A rodeo injury hospitalized him in Calgary where he picked up the guitar. After graduating from art college in Vancouver, Tyson thumbed a ride east, arriving in Toronto just as the great folk boom was erupting. Brimming with confidence, good looks and a rich baritone voice, he joined the burgeoning coffeehouse circuit, later hooking up with Chatham-born Sylvia Fricker, seven years his junior and the daughter of a church choir master.

By 1963, Ian & Sylvia were operating out of New York’s hip artistic enclave Greenwich Village and enjoying immense acclaim on the U.S. college circuit.

Throughout, Tyson never lost his love for the cowboy culture. Bob Dylan was both a contemporary and admirer of Tyson (Dylan claimed to be a rodeo rider; Tyson was the real deal). While Dylan’s star soon eclipsed Ian & Sylvia’s, the impression he left on Tyson was enduring. “Truth be told, I didn’t get Dylan at first,” he admits.

It wasn’t until Dylan began writing his own songs that Tyson was moved to do the same. His first composition was Four Strong Winds.

The success of that song allowed Tyson to purchase a farm (he referred to it as his ranch) near Newtonville, Ont. Here he was able to live out his childhood fantasy as horses soon supplanted guitars in his life. By the late ’70s, divorced from Sylvia, Tyson was a washed-up country singer playing Calgary bars and living in a cabin on a friend’s ranch. A royalty cheque from Neil Young’s recording of Tyson’s signature song provided the down payment for his own ranch near the Alberta foothills.

In 1987, his album of modern cowboy ballads, Cowboyography, inspired by the annual cowboy poetry events in Elko, Nev., earned him multiple awards and sparked a career renaissance. The transformation of Ian Tyson, western cowboy, was complete.

He is now estranged from second wife, Twylla (who took him to the cleaners in their divorce). But the constants for Tyson remain his ranch, his horses and living the cowboy lifestyle, a way of life he laments is dying out.

Tyson makes no apologies for the turns he has taken. “Life is a series of mistakes and corrections,” he opines. “Everybody rides home the best way they can.”

 

Local music historian and author John Einarson’s latest book, due in 2011, is Four Strong Winds: Ian & Sylvia – Their Story, from McClelland & Stewart.