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BRAD WHEELER @ GLOBE AND MAIL
Canada’s ‘coolest cowboy’ Ian Tyson wrote Four Strong Winds

Singer-songwriter Ian Tyson wrote Four Strong Winds – a stately balladic lament in E major and a Canadian-set expression of romantic sorrow – in about a half an hour. It was his first attempt at creating his own song. A friend of his, Bob Dylan, had just written Blowin’ in the Wind. Inspired by Mr. Dylan’s imagery, Mr. Tyson wrote an instant classic as a self-challenge: “How hard can this be?” he thought.

Though it wasn’t completely a snap – his musical partner and future wife Sylvia Fricker contributed one line that Mr. Tyson was stuck on – Four Strong Winds as recorded by the folk act Ian and Sylvia charted high in Canada in October, 1963, competing with Bobby Vinton‘s Blue Velvet and Sugar Shack by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs.

A twangy hit version by U.S. singer-songwriter Bobby Bare earned Mr. Tyson enough royalties to buy a 350-acre farm in Ontario. Neil Young, who recalled plugging coin after coin into a jukebox to hear the song as a teenager in Manitoba, recorded it himself for his million-selling 1978 album Comes a Time. Mr. Tyson used the resulting money that came his way from that adaptation as a down payment on a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies, southwest of Calgary.

The melancholic song that touches on fresh starts and regional meteorology – “Think I’ll go out to Alberta, weather’s good there in the fall” – eventually got the songwriter to where he always longed to be.

Mr. Tyson, one half of the influential folk music revivalists Ian and Sylvia and a life-long embodiment of cowboy pride, died at his spread in southern Alberta on Dec. 29, after a series of health complications. The Victoria native was 89, and had undergone open heart surgery in 2015.

Tyson and partner Sylvia Fricker's beautiful ballad of lost love, Four Strong Winds, hit the top 10 chart in 1963.

The private-schooled, only son of a well-to-do British immigrant was a rodeo rider as a young man who after successful forays in folk music and country rock reinvented himself artistically as a sort of northern Gene Autry, writing and recording songs that stubbornly celebrated a vanishing way of life that was experienced on the back of a horse. A white-hatted mythologizer who “loved his old damned rodeo,” he championed the western side of country and western music.

His commitment to ranch culture was represented by rugged lifestyle choices – he bred cutting horses and rode them victoriously in competitions – and by his albums of cowboy music. The 1987 LP Cowboyography in particular rejuvenated Mr. Tyson’s status and touring career in North America, and with a single from 1989 he seemed to position himself as the Irving Berlin of the sagebrush people: “I wonder if old Irving ever wrote a song about blowed out country, a marriage gone wrong and a cowboy on the telephone?”

In 2005, CBC Radio One listeners chose Four Strong Winds as the greatest Canadian song of the 20th century. The composition is seminal. “Ian and Gordon Lightfoot were reflecting on the emotional, psychological and physical landscape of being Canadian songwriters,” Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor told The Globe and Mail. “They started it, and it means everything.”

Mr. Lightfoot described the Tysons as his “angels,” because they recorded his Early Morning Rain in 1964. “It opened up the door for me,” Mr. Lightfoot told The Globe. It was Mr. Tyson who convinced Mr. Lightfoot to sign a contract with Albert Grossman, the high-powered manager of Mr. Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Ian and Sylvia, among others. “From that, came my career,” Mr. Lightfoot said.

Mr. Tyson, the charismatic and irascible boot-wearing baritone with matinee idol looks, was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1992, alongside his by-then former wife. Eleven years later he won a Governor-General’s Performing Arts Award, and he is a member of the Order of Canada. The Washington Post once hailed him as “Canada’s cool cowboy.”

More infamously, Mr. Tyson holds the distinction of turning young Mr. Dylan onto grass, according to onetime Dylan muse and girlfriend Suze Rotolo. “The first memory I have of Ian is him introducing Bob to marijuana,” she told Ian and Sylvia biographer John Einarson for his 2011 book Four Strong Winds.

Ms. Rotolo and Mr. Dylan were close friends with the Tysons in New York’s Greenwich Village, folknik central in the early 1960s. The Blowin’ in the Wind singer deferred to the hip fashion choices of Mr. Tyson, eight years his senior. “It was no surprise when after we arrived in New York in the folk community all the guys started wearing cowboy boots and not rolling their jeans up,” Ms. Tyson said in Mr. Einarson’s book. “Ian had a sense of style that others copied including Bob.”

In his later years, Mr. Tyson was the darling of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering held annually in Nevada. “Ian was the patriarch of traditional cowboy music renaissance,” said Corb Lund, a friend and fellow western singer-songwriter.

There was a bit of Bach, a bit of Henry VIII (Greensleeves), some Schubert and a psalm, but not a hint of a guitar as Tyson and Fricker were married in Toronto on June 26, 1964.

Mr. Tyson dearly loved his ranch, the T-Bar-Y in Longview, Alta. He was fond of Navajo rugs, Mexican tiles and 6 a.m. coffee. His bookshelves, as revealed in a profile by The Globe’s Marsha Lederman in 2008, were stocked with To Kill A Mockingbird, a Georgia O’Keeffe biography, Hemingway, The New Yorker magazines, poetry by Robert Frost and The Western Buckle: History, Art, Culture, Function.

“He was the thinking man’s cowboy,” said Mr. Lund.

In 2006, he blew his voice out at the Havelock Country Jamboree. A year later, a virus further reduced his once-rich vocals to a soft croak. As a sufferer of arthritis, he played his Martin D-45 acoustic daily to keep his hands and wrists limber.

He had first picked up a guitar at the age of 22 after fracturing his ankle while rodeoing in Banff, Alta. Recuperating from surgery, he passed the time by learning to play Johnny Cash’s I Walk the Line.

More than 50 years later, a horse struck again, stepping on his foot shortly before his 2008 interview with The Globe. He limped and winced but went about his chores. “I’ll get used to it,” he said. “It’s the cowboy way.”

continued in part 2