Vaya Con Dios Renegade Picker

Just heard via Tom Russell that Steve Young has gone down the long trail.

Here’s a reboot of a previous post by way of tribute.

Steve Young was one of the great songwriters to come out of the mighty creative burst of the early 1970s country music insurgency. He wrote the classic “Seven Bridges Road,” made famous by the Eagles (I like Young’s version best) and “Montgomery in the Rain,” which may be the best Hank Williams tribute song ever, partly because it’s so oblique. He also penned “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean,” which, in Waylon Jennings hands, helped kick off and define “Outlaw Country.”

 

For some reason, he never caught on big-time as a performer, despite having a soaring, powerful voice and outstanding acoustic guitar chops. Like his compañeros Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, he was really more of a folk singer than a country artist anyway.

One of my favorites in the Steve Young catalog is his adaptation of a Stephen Vincent Benet poem  “The Ballad of William Sycamore,” which spins a kind of mystical history of the West through the life of the character of one who was “cradled on twigs of pine in the skin of a mountain lion” — one who “could not live when they fenced my land; it broke my heart just to see it.”

The Ballad of William Sycamore

 

My father was a mountaineer
His fist was a knotty hammer
He was quick on his feet like a runnin’ deer
And he spoke with a Yankee stammer

And some are wrapped in linen fine
And some like a godling’s scion
But I was cradled on twigs of pine
In the skin of a mountain lion

I lost my boyhood and found my wife
A girl like a Salem clipper
A woman as straight as a hunting knife
With eyes as bright as the Dipper

We cleared our camp where the buffalo feed
Unheard of streams were our flagons
And I sowed my sons like apple seed
On the trail of the Western wagons

They were right, tight boys, never sulky or slow
A fruitful, goodly muster
The eldest died at the Alamo
And the youngest fell with Custer

The letter that told it burned my hand
I smiled and said, “So be it!”
But I could not live when they fenced my land
Oh it broke my heart just to see it

I saddled the red, unbroken colt
I rode him into the day there
But he threw me down like a thunderbolt
And he rolled on me as I lay there

Now I lie in the heart of the fat, black soil
Like the seed of a prairie thistle
It has washed my bones in honey and oil
And it’s picked ’em as clean as a whistle

And my youth returns, like the rains of Spring
My sons, like wild geese flying
And I lie and I hear the meadowlark sing
And there’s much content in my dying

Go play with the town you have built out of blocks
The towns where you may have bound me
I sleep in the earth like a tired old fox
And my buffalo have found me

I sleep in the earth like a tired old fox,
And my buffalo have found me