Don Edwards (March 20, 1936* – October 23, 2022) was anAmerican cowboy singer, guitarist, and recording artist who specialized inWestern music. Edwards released more than a dozen solo albums from 1980 through2010, as well as a greatest hits collection. Two of his albums, Guitars &Saddle Songs and Songs of the Cowboy, are included in the Folklore Archives ofthe Library of Congress.
Singer/songwriter Don Edwards has dedicated his musicalcareer to recapturing and preserving the spirit of the Old West by recordingold and new cowboy songs. Almost alone in his enthusiasm when he took up thecowboy genre, by the 1990s he reigned as the pre-eminent specialist in a fieldthat began to attract many other musicians. Edwards was born and raised inBoonton, a New Jersey farming community. Inspired by the books of cowboy authorWill James (such as The Lone Cowboy), he took up the guitar at age ten. Helearned his first Western songs from the films of cowboy crooners Gene Autryand Tex Ritter, later discovering Jimmie Rodgers. At age 16, he left home towork in the oil fields and ranches of Texas and New Mexico in order toexperience Western life and the landscape firsthand.
Edwards made his professional debut in 1961 after he washired as a singer, actor, and stuntman at the newly opened amusement park SixFlags Over Texas. He worked there for five years before moving to Nashville toseek a recording contract. Although the folk revival was in full swing, no onewas much interested in Western music at the time. Edwards eventually recordedan album combining classic Western numbers with some of his own compositions onthe independent Stop label. Some of the songs were played on the radio, butthey never hit the charts, and Edwards returned to Texas and settled in theFort Worth area.
Here’s “Whoppi Ti Yi Yo” from above CD
In 1980, Larry Scott, a Los Angeles DJ, helped Edwardsrecord the Happy Cowboy album, which featured backup musicians from GeneAutry's band and the Sons of the Pioneers. Edwards released the album on hisown Sevenshoux label. A visit to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada inthe early '80s inspired him to create a 24-song tribute to Jack Thorp, thecowboy musician who first began collecting traditional cowboy songs, on acassette packaged with a book entitled Songs of the Cowboy. He then released asecond book/cassette anthology, Guitars and Saddle Songs, and in 1990 releasedthe album Desert Nights and Cowtown Blues.
In 1992 Edwards signed with the new Warner Western labelhelmed by Michael Martin Murphey and released Songs of the Trail, a spare albumof traditional songs that gave the dry, melancholy, sometimes-violentnarratives of the cowboy a startling immediacy. Edwards gained exposure fromhis major-label association and became a fixture at clubs and events with anykind of Western theme throughout Texas and the Southwest. He followed up Songsof the Trail with Goin' Back to Texas (1993), an album containing new Westernsongs by some of the best writers in Nashville. Also in 1993 he appeared onNanci Griffith's Grammy Award winning album Other Voices, Other Rooms on whichhe accompanied Griffith on a Michael Burton song entitled "Night Rider'sLament".
The summer of 1997 found Don in Livingston, Montanaportraying the role of "Smokey" in Robert Redford 's film The HorseWhisperer. Also that year Edwards moved to the folk-oriented Shanachie labeland continued to dip into his vast song bag of traditional Western materialwith the double-CD Saddle Songs: Vols. 1 & 2 of 1997.Subsequent Shanachiereleases saw Edwards branching out musically even as he stuck with Westernsongs. My Hero, Gene Autry: A Tribute (1998) was recorded at a live appearancehonoring Autry on his 90th birthday, and two years later Edwards resurfacedwith Prairie Portrait, a project recorded with cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell andthe Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.
Kin to the Wind, a tribute to Marty Robbins, was issued inearly 2001. The 2002 project High Lonesome Cowboy teamed Edwards withfolk-bluegrass singer Peter Rowan and several other acoustic music luminaries,putting a new twist on Edwards' cowboy material. A final Shanachie project, thedouble-disc Last of the Troubadours: Saddle Songs, Vol. 2, appeared in 2004,followed by Moonlight and Skies on Western Jubilee in 2006. In 2005, Edwardswas inducted into the Western Music Association Hall of Fame.
Don Edwards died on October 23, 2022 at the age of 86.
(Edited from AllMusic & Wikipedia) (* other sources give1939 as birth year)
