Photo: Little Jack Films & Album Cover Design: Connie Collingsworth

For most people, the singing cowboy is strictly an archetype of commercial entertainment, a term that conjures up images of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter and others from the cinematic genre that flourished in the previous century. Modern audiences probably have a stronger connection to its parody than to those bygone stars of the silver screen—my brother and I binged on Rustler’s Rhapsody long before my kids were introduced to Woody from the Toy Story franchise.

But the singing cowboy was a real figure of course, picking and singing at the campfire, belting out tunes to the herd—songs about cowboying that were written, traded, and passed down on the wind by working cow hands who moved between trail rides and ranch work across the North American West. A few of the singing cowboys even found their way to recording studios. But that was all before Hollywood—and then Nashville—discovered the music’s appeal.

In the decades since, the real ranchworking musicians have largely disappeared, trends in both music and capitalism conspiring against them. Yet lately, a new generation of ag workers have been helping power an exquisite revival of traditional country and folk music, reinventing an art form that has always served as a balm during the nation’s hardest times–it’s rapidly growing fan base confirming our current situation.

Colter Wall, a singing, yodeling, guitar-playing, song-building, poet-cattle-rancher from Saskatchewan, has been a musical revival unto himself. One year since the release of his latest album, Little Songs, and almost a decade into a career that began in his teens, Wall, when not tending to his cattle duties, is one of the leaders of this modern music rebellion.

Much of Wall’s appeal—he has amassed more than 5 million Spotify followers, an astonishing feat for an independent artist making music that’s been out of favor for half a century—is that he is the genuine article. He runs his own ranch not far from where he grew up in western Canada, and despite the preternatural musical gifts, his ranch work takes a backseat to nothing.

As such, Wall’s songs about cowboy work, or the cowboy mindset, or life in lonesome places, are knowing. For his fans who’ve never broken a horse or busted the sod, Wall’s music is a window into an exotic world. For his fellow ranch workers who flock to his shows, it is a mirror.

Wall’s emergence has thrust an old cultural tradition into our hypermodern times, and raises the question: What makes the singing cowboy sing? Bankers don’t sing banking songs. We recognize no genre of lawyer songs. If there’s boom of singing computer coders right now, I’ve missed it. Sure, people from every profession can make music, but there aren’t many trades where the craft itself becomes the musical form.

Some say the practice originated as a means to keep the cows calm at night. One of the hazards of a long cattle drive is a spooked herd that stampedes in the darkness. Based on the sheer number of songs about herding, it is a sound theory. Wall recorded one from this canon, “Night Herding Song,” on his 2018 album Songs of the Plains. He did it without accompaniment, save for the crackle of a campfire, his weathered, weary vocals re-creating the sound that would have existed, and that still exists, on a long cattle drive.

Others speculate that the singing cowboy was trying to keep himself awake while on watch, or maybe to let would-be predators know that there was something between their appetites and all those hides. Still others hypothesize that the cowboy sung to fend off boredom, or his own fear of the dark. In his collection of cowboy songs, The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing, Guy Logsdon suggests that cowboys are sentimentalists who like to honor their trade with homages to it.

This feels like space Wall occupies. He clearly loves his subject. His songs—the ones he’s written and the ones he covers—focus on the work itself, and the satisfaction it provides, and he is adept at painting vivid pictures of life in the saddle, at using real ranch language, and letting us in on what the lonesome figure is thinking. “A man can be alone, and you can duck underneath all your trials and troubles for a time//Like a pronghorn underneath a bottom wire,” he sings on “Cypress Hills and the Big Country.”

Guy Logsdon also notes that cowboy songs are all songs sung by cowboys, “not just those songs with a cowboy theme or protagonist.” This expands the catalogue of cowboy songs significantly, and explains the preponderance of murder ballads, gunfighter songs, dance tunes and tales of the Old West in the genre. Here again Wall has re-stocked the musical pond, contributing breathtaking originals and breathing new life into old standards.

But it also complicates the question of what makes the cowboy sing. Instead of being utilitarian—songs to soothe the cows or honor the work—perhaps the impulse to sing comes from somewhere else entirely. What if it isn’t about the cows as much as it is about the music?

There’s long been an air of romanticism about cowboy philosophy and the old-soul, earthly wisdom these figures can possess. Surely then, the seers among them would understand full well music’s inherent grace. Like a miracle, music moves us to dance, to worship, to celebrate, to grieve, to act. It comforts us, lifts us up, and carries with it needed knowledge and truth. Maybe those insights come factory equipped with the old soul, and the cowpuncher is left with no choice but to sing.

Or perhaps it’s simply a result of spending all that time alone, atop a horse, in nature’s splendor, amongst the percussive beat of hooves, the melodies of birds and cicadas, the wind wobbling the aspen leaf.

Either way, the singing seems like it might be the point of the singing cowboy, a hypothesis that feels confirmed listening to Wall’s latest music. One need look no further, after all, than the title track of the new album, “Little Songs.” In it, Wall provides character studies of two separate people living isolated lives in hard, remote locations, and concludes, “Might not see a soul for days, on those high and lonesome plains//You got to fill the big empty with little songs.”

As a line in a song, that’s a statement. As the refrain of a title track, in an era with unseen-before levels of loneliness, anxiety, and dread, and in a moment where snake oil and false prophets are being peddled as cures, it’s a life preserver.

There are two songs on the album about dancing, the beautiful love song, “Prairie Evening/Sagebrush Waltz,” and “Honky Tonk Nighthawk.” And Wall returns to the theme twice on the song “For a Long While.” He opens the tune by singing, “This old guitar, I’ve toted far, and though she’s sometimes out of tune//She earns her keep, each time she speaks, in the dance halls and barrooms//There ain’t an hour that old ‘Wildwood Flower’ don’t procure a little smile//I guess that’s how it’s always been, or at least for a long while.”

On the second verse, he sings, “It never fails, when the world ails you, and throws you to the ground//Some old song, forgotten long ago, comes back around//Picks you up, dusts you off, in an old analogue style//I guess that’s how it’s always been, or at least for a long while.”

In both instances, he’s testifying to music’s power to change our moods, our minds, our hearts. And to make us feel recognized. For Wall, music’s ability to empathize is not merely present in his lyrics, it’s a power he honors in his touring schedule as well.

“When I first spoke to his manager,” recalls his booking agent Matt Runner, “I asked him what he wanted out of his tours and performances, and he said, ‘two words: cowboy hats.’ It’s important to Colter that we’re not asking ranchers and farm workers to travel far if they want to see him play. We tend to book around certain rodeos and in ag towns over bigger cities, even if it means a smaller venue.”

I recently saw Wall and his band play in such a setting—the FairWell Festival in Redmond, Oregon, a relatively new music event connected to a county fair, out in the central part of the state where the natural resource economy thrives. He drew a large, enthusiastic crowd, come straight from work, still in their boots and hats, cans of dip lining the pockets of their Wranglers. They roared when Colter asked, “Want to hear a song about cow punching?” before going into “Happy Reunion.”

Those fans hail from a workforce that continues to be vital to the national well-being, but that, along with others like it, can’t crack the national dialogue, feel invisible, and as a result, are not whole. But on this night, under a full moon in the mountains of my home state, the music sees them.

The crowd that night contained all types, young, old, city, country, women, men—all the usual distinctions employed to classify, and divide, us. But there we all were. At one point my eye caught a pair of buddies just in front of me, two guys in their early 20s. I learned that they were at their first Colter show, and I watched their excitement turn into joy as they got one favorite song after another. I couldn’t help but feel their joy too, and think back to that time in my own life, and to the people with whom I shared those experiences.

Towards the end of the show, I noticed that one of those boys had a keychain clipped onto his belt that contained a well-known political slogan, one that signaled he and I were on opposite sides of the modern political chasm. In another environment, it might have bothered me. If I hadn’t been standing alongside him for an hour, happy and nostalgic over our commonalities, I may have even unfairly judged him. But there we all were. Because music’s greatest power of all may be its ability to bring people together, to bind us to one another, to be a source of shared experiences, to promote understanding, and remind us of our shared humanity.

In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter why the cowboy sings. It only matters that he does.

You got to fill the big empty with little songs.