46/ APRIL 2023 THE RIDER APPAREL


Ian Tyson Obituary


The family of the late Canadian country legend Ian Tyson, CM AOE, has confirmed the singer-song- writer died from on-going health complications on December 29th, 2022 at his ranch in southern Alberta, Canada at age 89. Ian is survived by his son Clay in Toronto,


daughter Adelita (Hunter) and granddaughter Mesa in Texas.


Tyson was inducted into the Canadian Country


Music Hall of Fame in 1989, and was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, with his former wife and singing partner, Sylvia, in 1992. Tyson be- came a Member of the Order of Canada in 1994 and in 2003, he received a Governor General’s Perform- ing Arts Award, and inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2006. Tyson was born to British immigrants in Victo-


ria, and grew up in Duncan B.C. A rough stock rider in his late teens and early twenties, he took up the gui- tar while recovering from an injury he sustained in a bad fall in the rodeo. Ian Tyson’s story from there is familiar to most.


He upped stakes from Vancouver Island and hitch- hiked to Toronto, where he met a young singer from small-town Ontario called Sylvia Fricker. As Ian & Sylvia, they were the Canadian stars of the early ’60s folk boom that gave the world Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, the Clancy Brothers, and the Kingston Trio.


Married in 1964, the pair made almost a dozen


albums — and wrote some of Canada’s best-loved songs, including Ian’s “Four Strong Winds” and “Someday Soon,” and Sylvia’s “You Were on My Mind” — songs that have all been covered countless times by some of the most famous artists of our time, including Dylan, Neil Young, Judy Collins, and a young Canadian singer the couple mentored in his early days, Gordon Lightfoot.


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During the British Invasion, Ian and Sylvia


evolved into pioneers of country-rock. Their band, Great Speckled Bird, rivaled the Byrds and other groups which helped create modern country, a decade before the Urban Cowboy phase of contemporary “new traditionalists.” After hosting a national Canadian television


music show from 1970 to 1975, Tyson realized his dream of returning to the Canadian West. The music and marriage of Ian and Sylvia had ended. It was now or never. Disillusioned with the Canadian country music scene, Tyson decided the time had come to re- turn to his first love – training horses in the ranch country of southern Alberta. After three idyllic years cowboying in the Rock-


ies at Pincher Creek, Tyson recorded the album Old Corrals & Sagebrush, consisting of cowboy songs, both traditional and new. “It was a kind of a musical Christmas card for my friends” he recalls. “We weren’t looking for a ‘hit’ or radio play or anything like that.” Unbeknownst to Tyson and his friends, the cowboy renaissance was about to find expression at the inaugural Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering in 1983; a small coterie of saddle makers, rawhide braiders, cowboy poets and pickers discovered one another in a small cow town in northern Nevada. Tyson was in- vited to perform his “new western music”— and he’s missed only one or two gatherings in the 30-plus years since. Bob Dylan and the Band recorded his song


“One Single River” in Woodstock, New York, in 1967. The recording can be found on the unreleased Genuine Basement Tapes, vol. 1. Judy Collins recorded a version of his song “Someday Soon” in 1968. In 1989, Tyson was inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame. In 2005, CBC Radio One listeners chose his song “Four Strong Winds” as the greatest Canadian song of all time on the series 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version. He has been a strong influence on many Canadian artists, including Neil Young, who recorded “Four Strong Winds” for Comes a Time (1978). Johnny Cash would also record the same song for American V: A Hundred Highways (2006). Life has not been without its difficulties, how-


ever. In 2006, he seriously damaged his voice after a particularly tough performance at an outdoor country music festival. “I fought the sound system and I lost,” he said


afterwards. With a virus that took months to pass, his smooth voice was now hoarse, grainy, and had lost much of its resonant bottom end. After briefly enter- taining thoughts that he would never sing again, he began relearning and reworking his songs to accom- modate his “new voice.” To his surprise, audiences now paid rapt attention as he half-spoke, half-sung fa- miliar words, which seemed to reveal new depths for his listeners. Tyson released his most recent single “You


Should Have Known” in September 2017 on Stony Plain Records, the label that Tyson’s released fifteen albums with since the ‘80s. The song unapologeti- cally celebrated the hard living, hard drinking, hard loving cowboy life and joins his favorites such as hits like “Four Strong Winds,” “Someday Soon,” “Sum- mer Wages” and more. The family will hold a closed service and have


Ian


requested privacy at this time. Donations in Ian’s memory can be made to The Tyson


Legacy www.westernfolklife.org/donate Fund -


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