Wylie Gustafson: On the weekends, he would come home from a hard week’s work, and we would watch Lawrence Welk and then turn off the TV, and he would grab his guitar and start singing cowboy songs to us. "Sierra Peaks," or "Sierry Peaks,” that was my favorite song to growing up of Dad’s. What I liked about cowboy music was it painted a vivid picture and told a very wild story. That song was about two cowboys who go get drunk one night, and on their way home they met up with the devil. Of course these two cowboys were ropers so one roped the horns, and the other roped the feet, and they stretched him out.
[music]
NS: I know you love that classic cowboy sound. You like rock and roll a little bit too.
WG: To me, cowboy music should be able to borrow musically from any genre that it wants to. There’s no rules that say cowboy music has to be a Bob Wills-type song or a Sons of the Pioneers type song. That was the old days, but nowadays, when I'm hanging out with the hardworking cowboys up in the Northwest or up in Montana, these young guys, to look at their CD collection amazes me. It’s all over the map. It’s AC/DC, reggae music, blues music. Anything that a cowboy will listen to is cowboy music.
[music]
WG: You go up to Montana, and dancing is huge up there. When I grew up, everybody knew how to jitterbug, so the music they liked to listen to had almost a Rockabilly beat to it. I think there’s a history of cowboy music and heavy rhythm, and I just love writing cowboy music with a heavy rhythm and borrowing from, you know, maybe a Keith Richards guitar riff or something like that.
[music]
WG: If we just continually look back and just do old cowboy music and are basically re-enactors and don't come up with anything new, we are going to lose the young audience.
NS: You’ve become famous in a variety of ways for yodeling. Was that something that your father did too?
WG: Yes, my father was a yodeler, and he gave me the bug. My dad would yodel whenever he was happy.
NS: Could you give me a good yodel you remember from your dad?
WG: You bet.
[yodels]
WG: Yodeling has been very good to me, you know, I made a lot more money yodeling for commercials than I ever did yodeling for crowds of people in California. You know, you didn’t make any money playing in a band, but I sang for a lot of national TV commercials, Miller Lite, Porsche, Taco Bell, just the list goes on and on. Back in 1996, I think probably about the tenth commercial that I ever did was the Yahoo commercial. The little three notes, and I’ll do it for you right now.
[yodels]
WG: Those three notes, they took very good care of me. And that’s what bought my first riding arena and a few cutting horses. That got me started off in the cutting horses.
[music]
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