2 weeks Ago By By Janelle Faignant Correspondent
It’s not every day you get the chance to hear a real cowboy sing original country western tunes, but Bob Bovee will perform from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, April 26, at the Adamant Community Club.
“Have you heard those real old recordings of a cowboy singing a traditional song?” Cowboy Magazine said. “The songs have an ‘old’ quality about them, and the singers’ voices seem to belong to a (cowboy) just in from off the trail. Bob Bovee .
.. renders these songs with authenticity and affection.
It seems as though he belongs to this music and it to him.” A Nebraska native whose family sang and played old-time songs, Bovee learned many western and railroad songs from his grandmother and uncle. “I have always been fascinated with the West: cowboys, western music, rodeo and so on,” he says on his website.
And he grew up hearing a lot of commercial country, like Hank Snow, Hank Williams and Jimmy Rogers. But his real influences were people doing exactly what he does today. “When I was in high school there was a big folk music revival, like late ’50s into the ’60s, so all my friends were listening to folk music and some of them were starting to play and it was really quite a heady time,” he recalled.
“There were four or five coffee houses doing music almost every night of the week, and my friends and I started going there and, to me, it was just eye-opening. To hear somebody sitting on a stage playing music, one person usually playing by themselves, and you could sit 10 feet away and listen to them. That was a seminal time for me.
I decided I needed to go out and buy a banjo. That’s what started it.” Authentic ballads, blues, ragtime, square dance, sentimental songs and tin pan alley favorites — these are his kind of songs.
“I’m not a songwriter; I’ve always felt, for me, it was better to help keep those songs alive,” Bovee said by phone recently. Rick Winston, who produces the music series in Adamant says Bovee is well-known in the Midwest but doesn’t get east too often, so it’s a rare chance to see him in person. “He’s not just a singer, he’s an historian, a storyteller, fascinated with the place that folk music plays in American history.
” At 79, Bovee has been playing for a long time but you’ll never hear the same show twice. “I decide what I want to do for each show individually,” he said. “My working repertoire is at least 500 songs.
Now, a lot of those I have trouble getting through unless I went back and refreshed myself on them, but I still have at least a couple hundred songs I feel good about.” Bovee chooses a new set list for each show. “Really, it has to do with playing places repeatedly.
I don’t want to go back and do the same things that I’ve done there before, so I’ll keep my old set lists and when I’m getting ready to play some place, I’ll go through (them) and try to pick material that I haven’t done at least for five years.” But it’s not just the songs that make his shows unique. He described it as “storytelling, humor, maybe a little bit of politics, the history involved in whatever the story of the song is, but also about where I learned it because I feel that credit where credit is due is important and often neglected by a lot of performers.
So, I like to talk about the interesting stories of how these songs came to me. “I’ve had a lot of influences that affected how I perform, and I learned a lot from Glenn Ohrlin, he was a winner of the National Heritage Award, the highest honor given in this country to folk artists. He had run away from home as a teenager to become a cowboy, and finally settled in the Ozarks and ran some cattle and performed when he could.
His storytelling and his performance of cowboy songs was a big influence on me.” “And Utah Phillips was probably the best raconteur that I’ve met in my many years,” Bovee said. “He was a songwriter and he did some traditional music but it was his stagecraft that I learned from him.
” David McLaughlin, of the Johnson Mountain Boys, called Bovee “a national treasure,” and Winston said, “With the breadth of his (repertoire), you just never know what’s coming next, whether it’s an old ragtime song or a cowboy ballad, an old sentimental parlor song. So, I’m really looking forward to it.” “I’ve told these stories for so long,” Bovee said, and by that right achieving what he set out to do, keeping them alive.
janellefaignant @gmail.com.
