Cowboy Tour (CD, Jun-2000, Rounder Select)

Let's get a few things said right up-front. First, this is a fun album, and a valuable one too. Second, it's increasingly difficult to find an anthology -- I refuse to use the latter-day coinage "compilation" -- that can actually be played straight-through for pleasure. Third -- and it has little if anything to do with somebody's decision to buy the album -- the good ol' USA will never get it right about acknowledging and rewarding its traditional artists.
OK, Point One: take a bunch of smart, glib, and accomplished working (or retired) cowboys, then put 'em on-stage in front of a lively audience, and let the recorders roll. Great formula, and bound to work wonders for the home-listeners. Whether it's jokes, high-class bragging -- or bullshit, to be blunt -- great guitar-picking, or poetry, it all pleases. For the record -- no pun intended -- I bought the disc unheard simply because it had Glenn Ohrlin on it, 'cause to me even three minutes of Glenn when he's only so-so beats the living Hell out of most people whne they're at their best. Fortunately, this isn't just "so-so": it's Glenn at his droll dry best declaiming Wally McRae'e classic poem "Reincarnation".
Something of a surprise to many listeners, I suspect, will be the Hawaiian numbers, which are musically the most alluring to me. The Haleamaus, father and son, had me doing the hula around my kitchen in Vermont as I looked-out over twenty inches of new snow. That's the power of music, folks!
Point Two is pretty self-explanatory -- the fact that you can just let the CD roll, without having the do all teh magic passes necessary to program-out anything that's wildly out-of-keeping with the other material, or just not to your own tastes. It's all good, and besides, some of us have never learned to program, our CD players anyway, and we're not about to do so now.
Which raises a chronological issue, a generational matter, about which I cannot resist making a point. The actual recordings were made in the mid 1980s, but the album didn't appear till the year 2000. That's almost a generation later, by which time the cowboy experience had faded from popular awareness and interest even further than it had in 1983, and it was pretty far gone then already. It had been said, with pardonable archness, that Americans have less historical memory than any other group of anthropoids since our ancestors came down from the trees. If that's even half-true, I suspect that a modern urban listener might hear this stuff, some of which older people remember from the first time around, and think it sounds like something from a previous geologic epoch, not just from an earlier time in American life. Too bad.
Too bad too that because of the kind of time-lag just cited, many or most of the artists on this album are pretty-well out of the picture, if they're alive at-all. And that brings me to Point Three: as a nation we get some credit for efforts like this album, but also as a nation, we should be ashamed that we deal with traditional culture only when we get around to it -- which is often too late, or after having to peel-away a bunch of other garbage that burdened those who live, and work, and create, outside main-line commodity culture. Not that these cowboys should have been taken out of the saddle and sentenced to "folk"-circuit, but when, if at-all, will we wake-up to living culture, instead of having to dig it out from under stupid neglect?