**1/2 Skip GormanA GREENER PRAIRIE
There's a vast,
dusty plain between
Gorman's
authentic cowboy music and Hollywood's idealized
cowboy-song genre from the
Sons of the Pioneers through
Riders in the Sky. From
the pens of real cowboy poets as well as New Hampshire-based Skip himself,
these vivid ballads overflow with desperados' and wranglers' dirt, sweat,
exhaustion, blood, and love of the open range, not to mention love of those
Mormon girls and the original "Yellow Rose of Texas." (She was a yellow-skinned
mulatto servant named Emily West who seduced Mexican general
Santa Anna in 1836
while Sam Houston's
Texas rebels prepared a surprise attack.) Lithe fiddle
tunes like those that cattle drovers once played around their campfires are
interspersed between songs. From 1899, cowboy poet John Wesley's "Last
Longhorn" poignantly shows the West vanishing even then. Yet, with his
immaculate diction and crystal-clear tenor, the yodeling Gorman re-creates that
West for just a moment.
-- Bruce Sylvester
(Skip Gorman plays First Parish Church, 35 Church Street, Watertown,
for the Folk Song Society of Greater Boston this Saturday, February 10. Call
969-1882.)
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