One of the great successes of last year’s Festival of Traditional Music and dance held in the Perthshire village of Killin was a band of entertainers from North America by the intriguing name of Cowboy Celtic. The name is an obvious clue to their inspiration and direction, but a listen to any of their three recordings to date sets the mind wandering. For example, take the opening track from their first album Cowboy Celtic. You’re listening to a tune called The Trail To Mexico, played sweetly on fiddle, mandolin and guitar and it’s conjuring up visions of a wagon train heading out to the American West. Memories are coming back of all the Westerns you saw at the Saturday morning ABC Minors Club – the Westerns as they were before they became “profound” with Native Americans saying “Why?” instead of “How?”

But hold your horses for a moment because the tune is about to slip seamlessly into another type of music. Suddenly there’s the unmistakable sound of a traditional reel. What’s going on? The answer, of course, is that the pioneers who opened up the American West came from the Old World, including the Celtic nations – and that’s where David Wilkie comes in.

David is the leader of Cowboy Celtic and has spent the past six years researching the Celtic origins of traditional cowboy music. His love of the songs and tunes is obvious and he’s at great pains to stress that the music is cowboy and not Country and Western. Already the band has toured in China, Hong Kong, Macao, Indonesia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and of course, in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England as well as all over the US and Canada.

So how did a man from Calgary, Alberta, get into singing Scottish songs? David pushes back the fine Stetson hat on his head. “Maybe 10 years ago, I don’t remember the exact date, I was at a Cowboy Poetry Gathering.” He says. “We have these all over the West and I was with this fellow called Ian Tyson, a well-known cowboy singer and my neighbour down the road. I had finished the show and I was sitting at the bar having a drink about four in the morning when this big cowboy got up and started to sing an unaccompanied version of “Annie Laurie”. The whole place just came to a standstill.”

David was intrigued and decided to find out more about these songs at their source. “I came over here a couple of times,” he says, “and I would hear songs that I recognized as cowboy songs out West.” His initial idea was to find just enough material to make a recording. “I made the Cowboy Celtic album thinking that was going to be the end of it,” he says “and I never planned on touring with the thing. It was just a project that I was working on, but people kept sending and bringing me more songs.”

Surprisingly, David seems to be the only one in Alberta, or in Canada itself, who knows the background to these songs.     “I’ve never heard anybody else do it,” he says, “and even in the States there’s only Michael Martin Murphey. He’s a big cowboy singer and a good friend, and as far as I know we’re the only ones doing it.”

One of the links between Old and New world is the cattle drover. David’s visits to Scotland revealed a domestic cattle industry in existence from at least the 14^th century. As our cattle industry declined, so the North American one was just beginning. “They were looking for markets to open up,” he says, “and I think at one point maybe 80 per cent of the ranches in Texas and Colorado were owned by Scots and Irish.”

One of the largest and most famous Texas ranches was run by the Matador Land  And Cattle company, founded by men from Dundee in the 1880s. “The biggest cattle trail in the States is called the Chisholm Trail,” he adds, “and the Chisholms were one of the big Borders cattle families.”

I asked David how difficult it was to find the background to the songs. “You really have to look into it a bit,” he says. “Take the history of the drovers, for example. It’s tough finding information on that. It’s taken years to get to this point and it hasn’t been an easy task.”

He does admit, however, that being a non-Scottish researcher has its advantages. “People here wouldn’t be too familiar with our cowboy songs because they’re very obscure, even in North America. But it was easier for me that way because I was able to recognize the tunes that were popular in the Wild West and I don’t think someone from here, maybe, would have known what they were.”

He tells some fascinating anecdotes on stage between songs. Did you know, for example, that General George Armstrong Custer’s mother was Scottish and that his favorite songs were “Annie Laurie” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me?”

David plays mainly in the USA. “We very rarely play in Canada because it’s such a small country, really, as population goes,” he says, “and we’re so close to the United States. There’s a lot of these Western Festivals which are just cowboy folk festivals and that’s where we spend most of our time.”

Each year, however, David and the band come over to Scotland for a month-long tour and they’ve recorded here and in Ireland. The band itself features David on mandolin and vocals, Denise Withnell on guitar and vocals, Scott Ring on whistles, Matt Woodward on fiddle, Nathan McCavana on bodhran and Keri Lynn Zwicker on Celtic harp.

Isn’t it very unusual for a cowboy band to feature a clarsach? “I think this is a first,” he laughs. “Maybe we’ll put this in the Guinness Book Of Records. And it’s even harder to find a clarsach player who wants to play cowboy music, but Keri is very open-minded and she’s really good. She has her own career but she always comes with us and we’re glad she does, because I don’t think I could ever find another one to do it. There are not too many cowgirl harp players!”

David is fully aware of the equation of cowboy with Country and Western. “It’s been a problem for us here,” he says, “and we’re trying to correct that. We’re not part of the Nashville music establishment,” he stresses. “they don’t like us at all, as a matter of fact. We’re too weird for them.”

I leave David to pack up after the show and head out on the rest of his tour. From Killin, its south to Melrose then back up to the Highlands – the band’s favorite area where they have a big fan base. “We’re going to Ullapool and to Stoer,” he says, “then we’re going back to Skye and Inverness. We have a lot of friends in the North-West, especially in the Ullapool and Achiltibule area.”

That will be another opportunity to visit Coigach. Now the “wild west” Coigach area north of Ullapool might not seem a tourist Mecca compared with, say Loch Lomond or Edinburgh Castle but to David it’s one of the most important areas in all of Scotland. “ That’s where some of the men who went to Montana to become cowboys came from.”

And there’s more, for one of the songs on the band’s first album is Mo Shoraidh Leis a Coigach (Farewell To Coigach), a song written in Montana in the early 20^th century by Murdo MacLean. MacLean was one of many Gaelic-speaking highlanders who went to the American West and the song, beautifully sung by Skyeman Arthur Cormack, tells of the drover’s yearning for his homeland and loved ones. David reckons it’s the only surviving song written in Gaelic in the American West. “We have descendants of these people coming to see us and it’s just fantastic,” he says. “There’s a real connection between that area and the Wild West.”

I take the final opportunity to ask the man from Calgary if he’s visited the other one on Mull. “Yes,” he says, “we went this trip. We expected to see McDonald’s burgers and everything there but we didn’t. What a beautiful place.”

So, proving the old adage that what goes around comes around, David Wilkie will continue his search for the origins of his beloved cowboy music. “I’ve really enjoyed it. I got to meet Phil Cunningham, Arthur Cormack sang on our CD and I just love the music so much that I can’t stop playing it. I’ve learned a lot from these people and it’s been a real thrill all the way.”

His music has been described as “theatre and imagery and history and storytelling and more, all wrapped up in sagebrush and tartan”. Look out for Cowboy Celtic when they next hit these shores.

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Edinburgh Evening News Knight Thursday June 15, 2000
Cowboys Take Up Reins of Celtic Culture
by Drew McAdam

EDINBURGH singer/songwriter Jim Knight opened the proceedings, giving us a glimpse of why he’s so popular on the Continent.  He has a booming voice, superb material, and a remarkably precise finger picking style.

And while he got the proceedings off to an admirable start, main act Cowboy Celtic were more than capable of taking up the reins.

A four-piece buckaroo band that blends Cowboy music and Celtic melodies conjures up visions of nasty Nashville-style Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Bonnie Jean material.  However, mandolin virtuoso David Wilkie dispelled any fears when he enthusiastically explained the strong links between the two musical styles.

Quite simply, the Highland drovers who left this country for Canada took their favorite traditional songs with them.  While driving herds of steer across the plains, when not dodging Injuns and tumbleweed, they would gather round the campfire for singsongs during which they would change the lyrics to suit their new country and new occupation.

This was the music that served as a foundation for countless cowboy classics, songs and tunes which Cowboy Celtic deliver with a polished professionalism and energy.  Ben Beveridge, every inch the archetypal cowpoke, played his fiddle with a stirring gentleness.  To this was added the haunting sound of Keri Zwicker’s Celtic harp.

With a gently strummed guitar and some thoroughly enjoyable mandolin playing, the Celtic connection of the Cowboy classics was hard to miss.

So, while the audience might have expected The Portree Kid, what we got was a blend of Roy Rogers and Dougie MacLean which lost none of the beauty inherent of Celtic music.  Our music had spent a few years abroad and returned with a Canadian accent.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable musical style which they deliver with a dazzling display of musicianship and style.  

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Bangundstrum
Colorado Springs Independent
The Cowboy and His Kilt - Celtic cattle and the music of the American West  by Owen Perkins

The West is a region of myth.  In the 30 years of the Old West’s heyday, from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the 20^th century, the bulk of the legends were born, leaving behind a legacy of song and cinema that historians have spent a century trying to debunk.

In the process of forging their own musical genre, David Wilkie and Cowboy Celtic have forever changed the landscape of the Old West.  Suddenly we’re finding Gaelic spoken at the Alamo and Scots at Little Big Horn, recording the soundtrack to a revisionist view of the West.

Wilkie has spent most of the past five years immersed in this cross-cultural music project, tracing melodies back to Celtic country and following the path of centuries-old immigrants bring their stamp to the West.  Speaking by phone with the Indy from his home in the ranch country of Turner Valley, Alberta, Wilkie spoke about a song he’s uncovered called “Farewell to Colgach,” written in Montana around the turn of the century by a Scottish immigrant cowboy.

“As far as I know it’s the last remaining cowboy song written in the Gaelic language,” Wilkie said.  “It was written in Montana around the turn of the century.  Colgach’s a mountain that’s on the coast right above Ullapool, a fishing village.  For some reason about 25 men of that village decided to move to Montana to become cowboys.  It’s an incredible story.”

Wilkie has also tried his hand at retelling more familiar tales, including the story of General Custer in his medley of “Garry Owen/Custer Died a-Runnin’/Off ‘til Monday.”  Wilkie explained that “ a lot of men that died with Custer were Irish and Scottish.  They introduced that music to Custer.  ‘Gary Owen’ was his battle song.  It’s an old Irish battle song that goes back centuries that his Irish men gave him in the Civil War.  They had a brass band on horseback and they actually performed those songs while Custer charged… But Custer didn’t bring them to Little Big Horn, because he figured they’d be in his way.  He left his Gatling guns and his musicians behind.”

After several visits across the water, Wilkie has become something of an expert on the link to the ancient cattle tradition in the old country.

“The cattle culture in Scotland, in particular, goes back centuries, six, seven hundred years of cattle stories and cattle driving, cattle thieving,” Wilkie explained.

“Their cattle industry was just winding down when the American cattle industry was just getting started.  They were looking for markets in which they could open up to do their cattle business, and the American West was that place.

I think at one point, maybe eighty percent of the ranches in Texas and Colorado were own by Scottish and Irish ranchers.”

With three albums to their credit, Cowboy Celtic has been focusing on showing the influence on American cowboy songs.  “What I’ve tried to do is take the cowboy songs and use Celtic instrumentation, like whistles, harps, and Celtic fiddle styles,” Wilkie said.  “And then I’ve tried to take the Scottish songs and play them in a more cowboy way.  I’ve tried to bring them into this middle ground somewhere where it’s a different kind of a deal.”

The band is at work on a new album, with more of a focus on the Old Country songs, delving farther back into the ancient cowboy culture.  “The castles would have these wars over cattle.  There’s just some fascinating stories that are not unlike Jesse James and Billy the Kid.  But they go back centuries.  Back into the 1300’s, 1400’s.”

Wilkie also found out about the cattle “trysts,” an old-fashioned precursor to modern day cowboy gatherings.  “It was the same kind of thing.  There was music, a lot of festivity, a lot of drinking, a lot of fighting,” he laughed.

In the long run, the Scottish drovers had at least one essential characteristic in common with their western counterparts.  “They sang to the cattle at night for the same reason the cowboys in the West did,” Wilkie said, “to calm the herd.”  

 The Calgary Herald
The Celtic Connection - the beating of an Irish Skin Drum, a soft Harp and a Fiddle, David Wilkie takes Cowboy Music Back To It's Roots - by Holly Quan 

Listen to David Wilkie’s album Cowboy Ceilidh and what do you hear?  No pedal steel, not a yodel or a Nashville twang.

Instead, a lilting fiddle tune, airy mandolin, tin whistle and harp are kept true to the beat by a bodhran (Irish skin drum).  Lyrical and haunting, these tunes are lighthearted, dancy and many of them are familiar – High Noon, Buffalo Gals, Streets of Laredo.  Is this cowboy music?  Folk music?  Country?

  Yes, yes and yes.

A 25-year veteran of the Canadian music biz, Wilkie has spent to past six or so years delving into the Celtic connection in cowboy music.

“In the time before the Highland Clearances in the 1750’s, the Scots were expert cattlemen.  Then the Highlanders were expelled from their land, and many emigrated to North America, especially to the West,” Wilkie explains.

“They brought their music with them, changing the words to suit their new situation and surroundings.

“People hear ‘cowboy music’ and they think of Garth Brooks, sequined suits and prefabricated music.”

He notes country music used to be known as country and western but during the 1970’s, Nashville music mavens made a deliberate effort to shed the western part.

“They kept the cowboy image but the music was disassociated from its roots.”

Real cowboy music, Wilkie contends, is the folk music of the West.  As such, it made use of the time-honored pattern of putting new words to familiar tunes.  The songs that came over from Scotland were full of stories and legends, outlaws and cattle rustlers.  It was a short step from there to songs about cowboy life in the West.  A song known in Scotland as The Unfortunate Rake and in Ireland as The Bard of Armagh became Streets of Laredo.  A Scottish lullaby became Whoopie Ti-Yi-Yo.  The connections go on and on.

Cowboys and their songs have always been part of Wilkie’s life.

“I loved Roy Rogers, Rex Allen, Gene Autry.  Virtually every picture of me as a kid shows me wearing a cowboy hat.”

In high school, Wilkie was playing guitar, banjo and bass.  In 1966, he left his native San Francisco for Vancouver.  Wanting to explore more of the cowboy music he loved, Wilkie moved on to Calgary in 1973.  Besides continuing to play and develop his licks, he became music director at CFAC, Calgary’s only country radio station at the time.

  Wilkie hosted a weekly cowboy music radio show and even found time for some actual cowboying on ranches south of the city.

Along the way, Wilkie started playing mandolin.

  “An accident, like many things in life,” Wilkie says.  “Someone owed me money but gave me a Gibson mandolin instead.  I soon figured out that it was much easier to transport than a bass.”

Wilkie learned his picking from records and from working with other mandolin players, and he chose his mentors well.

“I learned a lot from Bill Monroe, Jethro Burns of the comedy duo Homer and Jethro, and Tiny Moore, who played mandolin with Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys and with Merle Haggard,” Wilkie says.

“I also liked the less traditional styles of Levon Helm and Dash Crofts.”  Today, Wilkie is a virtuoso, playing with the likes of Ian Tyson, Wilf Carter and Michael Martin Murphey, among many others.

Les Siemieniuk is general manager of the Calgary Folk Festival and a former music programmer with CBC radio in Calgary.  He notes Wilkie has kept a level head in the music business, never selling the rights to his songs, and opting to produce his own albums instead of signing his life over to a record company.

Wilkie first noticed the Celtic lilt in cowboy music one night in Elko, Nev.

“I was in a bar about four in the morning when this cowboy singer did a version of Annie Laurie, an old Scots ballad.”

Intrigued, Wilkie began delving into the Celtic heart of cowboy music and discovered an enormous amount of material.  His repertoire now includes not only western adaptations of Celtic songs, but true made-in-the-west songs that sound great when given the Celtic treatment complete with harp, pipes, whistles and flutes, then hitched to traditional jigs, reels and two-steps from the old country.

“I’ve been aware of a Celtic influence in cowboy music for 40 years,” comments cowboy music icon Ian Tyson, “but I just sang the old cowboy ballads without much thought to their origins.  I give full credit to Dave for bringing the Celtic connection into the open.  And I think he would have done it even if Celtic music wasn’t currently a craze.”

Wilkie’s also a songwriter.  His lyrics show a penchant for word play and irony, especially his song Custer Died a-Runnin’ – a cheeky view of what really happened at the Little Big Horn, incorporating the traditional Irish battle tune Gary Owen, said to be one of Custer’s personal favorites:

Standing on the battlefield

His pistols just a-smokin’

They said he was the last to yield

But they must have been jokin’

Wilkie’s low-key demeanor belies his prowess and accomplishments.  His Turner Valley home, a low-slung rambling affair with big bright rooms and flowered wallpaper, is crammed with posters, instruments, and music memorabilia.

Wilkie himself is a comfy couch of a guy with longish graying hair, the easy grin and twinkling eye of a master storyteller.  Denise Withnell, Wilkie’s wife and guitar player/vocalist in his band, has shared his life and musical passions for 13 years.

Wilkie’s band, Cowboy Celtic, currently comprises Wilkie and Withnell, harp player Keri Zwicker, fiddler Ben Beveridge, Scott Ring on whistles and Nathan McCavana on bodhran.

Wilkie tours extensively in the western U.S. playing folk and cowboy festivals, clubs, West Fest (a huge annual country music jamboree in Colorado) even such venues as the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio in Santa Clarita, home of such famous dusters as Gunsmoke and High Noon.

The band has also done three tours throughout Scotland, picking up new tunes and taking cowboy versions of traditional songs back to their home turf.

According to a concert reviewer writing in the Edinburgh Evening News about the most recent tour in June, “Our music has spent a few years abroad and returned with a Canadian accent.  It’s a thoroughly enjoyable musical style which they (Cowboy Celtic) deliver with a dazzling display of musicianship and style.”

Inexplicably, venue managers in Canada have been slow to pick up on Cowboy Celtic, but Tyson comments that playing to a niche market has always been difficult in Canada.  “The U.S. market is simply more diverse, and bigger,” Tyson says.

Perhaps the Wrangler Award will help raise awareness.  Presented to Wilkie in April 1999 by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, the award recognizes Cowboy Ceilidh as “the outstanding traditional western music album of 1998 – quite an honor for a Canadian.

Or perhaps we simply need to pay attention to Wilkie’s exceptional music and lyrics.  After all, these are songs about life in the West, about coyotes and windswept landscapes – about us – set to a smart jig tune that can’t help but put a smile on your face.

Listen up.

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Penguin Eggs Spring 2006
Cowboy Celtic
The Saloon Sessions
by Barry Hammond

This 10th anniversary collection brings together their favorite instrumental tunes from three previous releases: Cowboy Celtic, Cowboy Ceilidh, and The Drover Road, along with seven new tracks. Exploring musical territory that sounds like it could be the soundtrack from a classic western film, leader David Wilkie with bandmates Denise Withnell (guitar), keri lynn Zwicker (harp), Scott Ring (whistles), and Joseph Hertz (fiddle)perform such cowboy tunes as The Yellow Rose of Texas, Buffalo Gals, and Shenandoah in their original traditional style as well as Celtic tunes like O'Carolan's Quarrel With The Landlady and Carrickfergus. As Wilkie says in the liner notes, "this music forges a link between the ancient Celtic cattle culture and the more recent one of the American west," Lovely, yearning, melodic stuff.

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Cowboy Magazine March 2006
The Saloon Sessions
David Wilkie and Cowboy Celtic
 

THE FIRST Cowboy Celtic recording was 10 years ago, in 1995. This 21-song collection is a compilation of musically brilliant Cowboy Celtic instrumentals, many from previous recordings, but seven are new tracks.

The Cowboy Celtic band is a fan favorite, both at cowboy poetry and music gatherings and at Celtic music festivals.

More than 20 musicians have contributed to the group's recordings through the years, with Denise Withnell and David Wilkie being the foundation from the start.

Some of the instruments they play are not typically associated with cowboy music. Besides fiddle, mandolin, and guitar, there are often, harp, Irish whistle, bodran and other specialized and unusual stringed instruments. Regardless, the music they make is light, crisp, and catchy.

Among the songs we've heard on previous albums are "Buffalo Gals," "Lorena," "Annie Laurie," "Shenandoah," "Aura Lea," and "The Gal I lLeft Behind me." The new tracks include "The Pearl," "Newlett," "Carrickfergus," "The Cowboy Waltz," and "Craigellachic."

For easy listening in cowboy-and-Celtic style, this album is as good as it gets.

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Western Horseman April 2006
The Saloon Sessions
David Wilkie and Cowboy Celtic fans will recognize many of the 21 tracks featured in The Saloon Sessions: 10th Anniversary Instrumental Collection. Fourteen of them, in fact, appeared on the group's previous three releases. Interspersed throughout the CD are seven new tracks.

"Many of the tunes are the ones we love to play after our gigs, when we get together in an Irish pub or a cowboy saloon for a session, and a pint or two," says David Wilkie in the CD's liner notes. "The Scots and Irish have a centuries-old cattle culture, and they played a large part in developing the cattle industry in North America. So, for me, this music forges a link between the ancient Celtic cattle culture and the more recent one of the North American West."

"Buffalo Gals/The Old Chisholm Trail/The Blacksmith's Reel," opens the 21-track compilation. The CD's first new selection, "The Pearl," follows. Other new selections include: "O'Carolan's Quarrel with the Landlady," "Hewlett," "Carrickfergus/Summer Ranges," "The Cowboy Waltz/Tommy Bhetty's Waltz/The Wesfalia Waltz," "Craigellachie" and the CD's closing track, "Leaving Stoer."

Cowboy Celtic's unique take on songs of the Old West, complete with guitar, fiddle, whistle and harp accompaniment, has developed a solid following in the United States, Canada and Scotland in the past decade. Anyone with an appreciation for their previous releases will consider The Saloon Sessions a must-have.

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Cowboy Magazine March 2007
Gunsmoke, Whiskey & Heather
Cowboy Celtic