The Long Trail: My Life in the West (9 page)

With Conway Twitty on
The Ian Tyson Show.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

It was important for me to go beyond Ian & Sylvia, and the station wasn’t interested in belabouring the duo sound either. It was time for Ian & Sylvia to end, but the move would strain our marriage. I’m sure Sylvia was offended, though at the time it seemed that she took it all in stride. Or maybe that was me just being oblivious.

As it turned out, I handled the solo work on the show
just fine. My band rehearsed constantly; we were hungry and worked hard, and we garnered great ratings. I didn’t have my true vocal style down yet — that would come later, in the cowboy recordings — but we knew how to play country music. We had focus.

I put out my first solo album,
Ol’ Eon
, on A&M Records in 1973. The only reason I was on A&M was because of Albert Grossman’s power. To this day I think
Ol’ Eon
is a good record, but it didn’t get much attention. Nobody would give it a break. I couldn’t find that breakthrough song that gives a musician an identity. That’s how the industry worked back then, and still works to this day — you need the big song. Johnny Cash had “I Walk the Line.” Johnny Rodriguez had “Pass Me By.” Marty Robbins had “El Paso.” And I just couldn’t find that Ian Tyson song.

Canada had decided that its country hero was going to be Stompin’ Tom Connors, who won the Juno award for best country male vocalist every year from 1971 to 1975. He obviously struck a chord with certain Canadians, but I didn’t identify with his music. (As well, I thought the Toronto crowd’s acceptance of his work was pretty condescending and patronizing. To me it seemed that they regarded Connors’s material as hick music.) I was pretty bitter about Stompin’ Tom’s popularity at the time. He had as much right to be successful in show business as anybody, but I didn’t have the maturity to deal with other people’s success.

There’s a lot to be said for hanging in there when you’re not getting the recognition you think you deserve. Some musicians, like Jack Elliott, do that effortlessly, soldiering on through different fads and “eras” without any anger,
focusing on perfecting their art. That perseverance usually pays off. But I didn’t get that at the time.
Why the hell do I have to hang in there?
I wondered. I wanted recognition
now
.

Solo.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

I was also jealous of Gordon Lightfoot’s success. I’d helped him a lot when he was scuffling to get established in Toronto, and Ian & Sylvia had recorded a couple of his songs (“Early Morning Rain” and “For Loving Me”) when we were hot in the mid-1960s. I talked him up to Albert Grossman’s partner, John Court, who came up to Toronto and checked Gordon out, and they signed a contract. But it seemed that once Gordon became successful, he treated his old friends like unnecessary burdens from the past. He had all those hits in the 1970s, and I always felt he should have repaid the personal debt by cutting one of my tunes. Eventually, in the 1990s, he did cover one of my old Ian & Sylvia songs, “Red Velvet” — the song Johnny Cash was also a great fan of.

Sylvia and I kept drifting apart. We had very different ideas about how we wanted to live. When I wasn’t recording the TV show, I spent most of my time at the farm. She preferred Rosedale. Our musical careers had brought and held us together, but now that Ian & Sylvia was finished, our marriage slowly dissolved. We spent less and less time together even though we were technically still married.

Another woman entered my life as this was all going down. I was playing an old club in Montreal with the TV band when Katie Malloch came down to check us out. I think she was stringing for the CBC at the time — she would go on to host a variety of successful CBC shows — and we
fell hard for each other. Katie thought it was very romantic to be running around with a cowboy in Montreal. I’d go visit her there and she would come down to my farm when she could. For some reason my little bay mare took an instant dislike to Katie and bucked her off, breaking her wrist.

Clay also visited me regularly at the cattle farm. He did well out there. Even as a boy, Clay had a real aptitude around livestock. Clay knew about Katie — sometimes they were at the farm at the same time — but it’s hard to say what he felt about our affair back then. I wasn’t being very sensitive about the whole thing, that’s for sure.

Katie and I liked each other a lot, and eventually I told Sylvia. That was the breaking point. Sylvia could accept a lot of things but she couldn’t accept that. I don’t blame her.

Clay was eight or nine when we split in 1975. After we separated he lived with his mother, attending a Rosedale school for kids of well-to-do businesspeople and professionals. Being a shy kid, Clay had trouble fitting in. He struggled to pay attention in class, just as I had.

It was during this time of marital drifting and divorce that I became a serious horseman. I wish I could say it happened in cow country in the middle of Wyoming, but it happened in eastern Canada. A couple cowboys I rodeoed with, Jim McKay and Don Waugh, worked for Walter Hellyer, a farmer down near Waterford, Ontario. Walter and his family ran one of the first commercially successful ginseng operations in North America, but they also ran cattle and raised horses. Hellyer was very interested in quarter horses. By the time I met him, he’d started bringing up horses from
Texas — mostly old-style cowboy horses that came from the stud Hollywood Gold.

Jim and Don told me to get down to Hellyer’s place and ride these cutting horses. I had never ridden a cutting horse before, and I decided to give it a shot. Cutting has a long tradition in the West. After the American Civil War, when Texas cowman Charles Goodnight became the first man to drive cattle from Texas to Colorado, the Anglo cowboy was inventing himself on the job. There were no fences back then, and cattle from different owners mingled together on the open range. Charlie and the other cowboys would make sweeps of the country to gather huge herds for the drive. Then, if they had the time as they went up the trail, they would cut out the different brands and the owners would drive them back to their home range. (And if Charlie ended up driving somebody else’s cattle to Colorado, he’d even out the ledger with the owner when he got back, paying or trading for the cattle.)

Cowboys being cowboys, cutting cows from the herd quickly became competitive — not only for the riders but for the horses too. Those old punchers didn’t have the specially bred athletic horses we have now, nor did they have the perfectly manicured arenas with five or six inches of dirt to keep the horses from breaking their legs. The ponies in the old days had to do it among the cactus and the rocks and everything else.

In cutting it’s hard to know where the horse leaves off and the rider takes over. “You must learn to ride in a way that does not drag at the motion of a horse,” wrote my friend Thomas McGuane in a 1991
Sports Illustrated
story on cutting. “The body language between you and the horse
must be bright and clear.” In contests you’re not allowed to rein the horse, so all the cuing has to be done with your legs and spurs. You’ve got to stay centred on the saddle, hook your fingers under the saddle pad and keep them there until you quit the cow. McGuane again: “The herd instinct of cattle is tremendously strong, and to drive out an individual cow and hold her against this tidal force, a horse must act with knowledge, physical skill and precision. Otherwise, the cow escapes and returns to a thoroughly upset herd.”

When the horse made those first big moves to cut the cow from the herd at Hellyer’s farm, the G-force gave me a rush — a wonderful thrill I’ve felt every time I’ve ridden a cutting horse since. It’s unavoidable. The combination of explosive power and fluid movement becomes addictive very quickly. This was a hell of a lot better than goofing around at B.C. rodeos.

Hellyer took a liking to me and lined me up with my first cutting horse, Deljay’s Pistol, a gelding from Ohio that belonged to Dr. Leroy Hyman, another famous eastern cutting-horse breeder and cowboy. Deljay’s Pistol was a very kind horse; when I took him on the Ontario cutting-horse circuit, he’d overcome all my mistakes and still win us some prize money. And when I started winning cash, I was really hooked.

For whatever reason, Hellyer was very anxious for me to start breeding good horses myself. He’d bought four broodmares in the early 1970s from Dr. and Mrs. Stephen Jensen of the Double J Ranch in California. These weren’t just any mares, however. They were daughters of Doc Bar, a revolutionary stallion that was rewriting the book on the breeding
of cutting horses. For a bargain price Hellyer sold me one of those daughters, a big buckskin broodmare named Doc’s Able Mable — a well-travelled, placid old gal foaled in 1965 in California.

Having a horse with Doc Bar blood was a very big deal in the 1970s. Foaled in Arizona in 1956, Doc Bar was bred for the track, but it turned out he couldn’t outrun a fat man, earning just ninety-five dollars in four races. The little chestnut stud had other qualities, however. He was pretty as a picture; somebody once said he looked like “a perfect little watch fob.” Doc Bar’s perfect conformation won him a total of nine halter-horse grand championships, completely changing the ideal for the halter industry.

Doc Bar was just getting started. A prescient horseman named Charlie Araujo then turned him into a phenomenal success as a breeding horse. Charlie was a mystic who could look right inside a horse’s head, almost as if he had a built-in MRI. Somehow he knew that if he crossed Doc Bar with the Jensens’ Poco Tivio mares, he’d really have something. How exactly he knew this remains a mystery, but the stars were definitely aligned when the horse gods brought Doc Bar and Charlie together. Charlie’s prediction was bang on. Doc Bar had perfect conformation and prepotency — the ability to deliver all his traits to his progeny — and I was very fortunate to get one of his daughters.

When I got Doc’s Able Mable in the 1970s, a cutting broodmare spent many long days on the road, much like a musician. The American Quarter Horse Association hadn’t yet ordained the shipping of frozen semen by FedEx, which meant the mare had to make the long journey to the stud — and that usually meant Texas. So I took Doc’s Able Mable
to Buster Welch, the greatest cutting-horse trainer of them all. (In addition to being an exceptional rider and breeder, Buster pioneered the use of the round pen for training cutting horses and helped start the National Cutting Horse Association futurity in Fort Worth, Texas — an annual December cutting competition for three-year-old horses that haven’t been shown previously.)

Buster bred Doc’s Able Mable to his horse, a rising star named Mr. San Peppy. After running with Mr. San Peppy for a year, Mable was still open (not in foal). Finally Buster called me to announce that she’d caught, and it was back on the road for the mare — “uphill from Texas,” as the old drovers used to say, to Ontario. On February 10, 1975, Mabel foaled out a little yellow colt. I named him Doc’s Summer Wages.

As a yearling, Doc’s Summer Wages — or Yeller, as I called him — wasn’t much to look at. He was small and clay-bank yellow, just a colt. When he turned two, I stepped up on him, and within five seconds I was sitting on the ground with my batwing chaps over my shoulders like an errant knight’s cape. He didn’t buck; he just faded out from underneath me so fast he left me standing in midair.

For a long time I had ridden horses like my old man: get on and go. But now I was starting to move beyond that, learning real respect for a horse’s mind. The horse seems to know he’s a servant of man, and he somehow understands that, by moving with endurance and speed, he can enable man to do certain things.

The journey to the mind and soul of a horse is a long one — never-ending, perhaps. When you spend all your time with horses, you want to understand them fully. But
you can’t, and that’s the mystery that fascinates us. You can go as far as legendary horsemen like Buster Welch, and still you’ll never fully arrive. It’s challenging to go even that far, as top horsemen have always been very guarded about their knowledge. Buster was one of the exceptions. Catch him in the right mood and he’d share a bit. But horsemen like cutting legend Shorty Freeman didn’t say a thing. It just wasn’t part of what they did. The only way to learn from those guys was by observation. There’s a lot of logic to that, because there are no shortcuts with horses. You have to put in the time.