Preserving the cowboy tradition

COLUMBIA — With his lasso flying as fast and freely as his yodeling voice changes pitch, Cowboy Randy Erwin will wrangle the crowd at the 30th Annual Heritage Festival and Craft Show.

Randy Erwin Skalicky, 49, has spent almost 25 years spurring on the cowboy tradition. The trick roping and folklore in his routine conjure images of cowpokes squatting near the chuck wagon, warming leathery hands over a dying fire, spinning yarns and lariats to entertain themselves during extensive cattle drives.

But yodeling is perhaps a less-known brand of cowboy culture. In the days when vaudeville swept small American towns, singers would station outside the show tents to attract attention. When cowboys overheard their “clarinet voice,” they began to integrate it into their own music, Erwin said.

The mixture of falsetto singing and “hillbilly music”, as Erwin describes it, became yodeling, in which the singer creates a high-low-high-low sound by switching repeatedly and rapidly between the “head voice” and the “chest voice.”

Erwin will display his unique vocal ability and rope tricks at the Heritage Festival in Nifong Park at 12:30 p.m. Sunday. The festival begins Saturday with a cowboy camp that features stories, songs, poetry and cooking demonstrations by six members of the Missouri Cowboy Poets Association.

“The purpose is to preserve and promote the cowboy way of life,” said Jay Jones, 64, one of the poets who will perform at the cowboy camp. “We all wear hats and boots and jump on stage and present cowboy poetry.”

“It’s nostalgic, ya know, you get the whole Roy Rogers, Gene Autry thing going on,” Erwin said.

Cowboy Randy draws from his upbringing “in the middle of nowhere” on a rice farm in the coastal prairie of Ganado, Texas for his act. He heard stories from his dad about cattle driving that contribute to his folk stories, more so than his experience with the “scruffy little inbred kinds of cows” on the family farm.

Erwin hits the trail for performances up to 600 miles away from his home in Springfield, Ill. “It’s like delivering the milk,” he said. “You get up early, you go drive over land for usually four to five hours, you perform, and you get back on the road.”

The roper and yodeler has ranged from Carnegie Hall to Midwest libraries and elementary schools. He even yodeled in Walt Disney’s animated movie “Home on the Range” as Alameda Slim, an outlaw who nabs herds of cattle by hypnotizing them with his smooth voice.

Erwin was not always interested in “hillbilly” music, preferring to listen to recordings of Bach and Beethoven. Although he says many of his family members were “really good amateur musicians,” he “heard all this as a kid, immediately ignored it, and moved on to the Beatles.”

But when he developed his full baritone voice at about age 25, Erwin discovered a natural ability to create the “wild sound” of yodeling, and he couldn’t ride the fence any longer. “You get to the point where it’s kind of like walkin’ and breathin’,” he said.

His yodeling and twine-twirling just get better with age.

“I have my technique up after all these years,” he said. “The more wrinkled you get, the better off you are. Ya know, as an old cowboy, you get better respect from your peers.”