Andy Hedges’ latest album The Westerner is a collection of songs that straddle strands of the cowboy life and experience – whether that be on songs that are old enough now to be called traditional, and that draw on a heritage of cowboy poetry, or much newer songs such as today’s Eight Bucks & Change. It’s a song that was co-written by Hedges and Montana bronc rider and rodeo poet Paul Zarzyski, and it lives in a time period that’s starting itself to become historical, the days of the motorised rodeo rider with change in his pocket for the payphone. It’s an unashamed love song, a long winding trail of a love song, a trail that one half of the deal would happily have made considerably shorter. With just Andy Hedges on vocal and guitar and Rich Brotherton adding guitar, dobro, and bass it’s a song and a story that sits well in its simplicity – the easiest way to have messed it up and destroy its inner truths would have been to clutter it with more instruments, here it shines through untarnished, though it’s hero is a little scuffed around the edges.
The Westerner, as noted before, is a collection of such songs, and has a couple of guest appearances: Cow Trail Blues features Dom Flemons and Woody Guthrie’s Driftin’ Cowboy features none other than Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on background vocals, with Dom Flemons adding some harmonica to that tune as well. That’s a prospect that itself straddles the ages, does it not?
