Tag: riders-in-the-sky

Don’t Fence Me In, by Roy Rogers*.

I knew this first as a Riders in the Sky song, but I’m starting to wonder if Riders in the Sky might be the Jan & Dean to Sons of the Pioneers’ Beach Boys? If you get all of those references, our dads might have the same taste in music.

[checks Wikipedia once]

So, funny story, it turns out Cole Porter put this song together for a Roy Rogers movie, but the lyrics were very much by some cowboy poet out of Montana, and the studio et al screwed him out of a writing credit, because every stereotype about 1930s Hollywood is true.

And then they used it in like three more Roy Rogers movies. I looked up one after reading the words “Trigger’s dance ends” in the stage direction for the chords and lyrics to this.

[resists urge to look up how many horses really played Trigger]

Oh, and more recently, Willie Nelson recorded it, too.

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I’m probably singing it in the Riders style, but I added the silly Wildcat Kelly intro, which honestly doesn’t hold up too well, but when I looked it up to check if Wildcat Kelly happens to be some real person, I found Ella Fitzgerald singing this part, so it’s probably OK.

Added a cheeky cowboy solo, but I’m tired.

I Ride An Old Paint, Traditional, as by Riders In The Sky.

I don’t know this one as a Johnny Cash song, or a Linda Rondstadt song; I just know it as a cowboy song recorded by the silliest western group this side of Sesame Street: Riders In The Sky.

I’ve been nursing the same poor Riders CD for more than 20 years, I am sure of it, but I first heard them on public radio — WLRN 91.3 in Miami, after my parents split up and my dad didn’t get a television.

Public radio was the soundtrack of the every other weekend I spent with him, in his apartment, in his car (when it wasn’t Paul Simon or Steve Miller — but those tapes peaked before those years, I think), in thunderstorms on the Intracoastal, or on perfect days driving down to Miami Beach and back along A1A because it was easier than thinking of something else to do.

Our local NPR station was the place I heard real live blues — Ruth Brown — and the place I heard “country” music I didn’t hate — Riders Radio Theater. The goofy mystery segment was always appealing (with far, far less cynicism than Garrison Keillor, who I didn’t like until I was very much an adult, and then not for long, because ask not for whom the milkshake duck quacks…)

That radio was also the place I really heard (and felt) jazz for the first time, Miles Davis’s Nefertiti on one of those car rides south, but that’s not this story.

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Oh, so, I got that little MIDI keyboard in the mail today, and after a little bit of frustration (the real cause of the delay was the Bluetooth headphones, natch), I enjoyed the heck out of playing the software drums, bass, and piano on it.