[charlene]

part 2

Ian Dawson Tyson was born on Sept. 25, 1933, on Vancouver Island. He shared a middle name with his father, George Tyson, who had emigrated from England to Alberta, where he found work as a ranch hand in Bowden.

Finding the harsh work and climate not to his liking, Mr. Tyson’s father headed to British Columbia. There he met his wife, Margaret Gertrude Campbell, a second-generation British Columbian who came from money and a deeply moralistic Scots Presbyterian background. “She was always there for me over the years, but poor mother lived a pretty dour life,” Mr. Tyson said in his 2010 autobiography, The Long Trail.

Mr. Tyson’s father managed the Monarch Life Assurance Co.’s Victoria branch and kept polo horses on the family farm in Duncan. At the age of 6, Mr. Tyson encountered his first cowboy, at a rodeo in Vancouver. “He was wearing a purple satin shirt, and when he lifted me up and stuck me up on the saddle, I said to myself, ‘This is it.’ That saddle was where I was meant to be.” Raised on the novels of Will James, the paintings of Charlie Russell and the music of Roy Acuff and the yodeller Wilf Carter, Mr. Tyson pined to punch cows.

He graduated from the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) in 1958. The Jack Kerouac enthusiast hitchhiked to Toronto, where the folk scene bubbled.

There he worked as a commercial artist by day – he designed the logo for the dandruff-defying shampoo Resdan – and as a solo singer-guitarist at night. At a Ryerson Polytechnic gig he met Ms. Fricker, an aspiring folkie seven years his junior. Her high vibrato voice, eccentric wardrobe and a gift for harmony caught Mr. Tyson’s attention.

In turn, the future Ms. Tyson was struck by his handsomeness. “But it was not love at first sight,” she told biographer Mr. Einarson. “I didn’t think of it in terms of becoming a relationship.”

By 1961 the two had become the top coffeehouse draw in the city. That year they left for New York, where contracts with Mr. Grossman and with Vanguard Records were signed.

The pair were a hit on the East Coast college circuit and made their Newport Folk Festival debut in 1963. But just as their career was taking off, the Beatles changed everything. Driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, Mr. Tyson heard I Want to Hold Your Hand on the car radio. “They got to the part of the song where the voices go up,” he recalled in a recent interview with The Globe. “When they did that, I said, ‘We’re done. We’re done.’”

In 1964, the twosome returned to Toronto to play Massey Hall – “They are unquestionably masters of harmony and deliver their songs in a unique style copied from no one,” wrote Globe reviewer Marvin Schiff – and to get married. The wedding at St. Thomas’s Church was attended by 100 guests, including the colourful American folkie Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. The couple’s only child, Clay Dawson Tyson, was born in 1966.

As the folk movement lost momentum in the late 1960s, Ian and Sylvia relocated to Nashville and moved on to a brand-new style with their albums Lovin’ Sound, Nashville and Full Circle. “Those records were as close to the beginning of country rock that you’re going to find,” said Mr. Keelor.

In 1969, the duo formed the short-lived electric band Great Speckled Bird. From 1970 to 1975, Mr. Tyson played host to CTV’s The Ian Tyson Show, known as Nashville North in its first season. The Tysons divorced in 1975 because of Mr. Tyson’s infidelities. “Sylvia could accept a lot of things but she couldn’t accept that,” he explained. “I don’t blame her.”

In 1976, Mr. Tyson headed to Alberta and never left. He broke horses and chased cattle before purchasing his own ranch. Multinight stints at the Calgary honky-tonk Ranchman’s paid $5,000 a week.

Regret and wistfulness were consistent lyrical themes for Tyson. The Wonder of It All, for example, mourned a lost age: “The golden West has come and gone, right before our very eyes.”

A hard drinker for a time, Mr. Tyson’s personal life was perpetually complicated. When his career bottomed out in the late 1970s, he dulled his pains with tranquilizers. He met his second wife, Twylla Dvorkin, when she was a teenager and he was in his 40s. They later married in 1986, and were divorced in 2008. The song Estrangement is about the couple’s only child, Adelita.

The troubadour’s Navajo Rug (co-written with Tom Russell), Summer Wages and Someday Soon were chosen by the Western Writers of America as three of the top 100 western songs in history. Four Strong Winds has taken on anthemic status in Canada. Mr. Tyson performed it at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. When four RCMP officers were tragically killed in Mayerthorpe, Alta., in 2005, he sang it at the memorial service.

Regret and wistfulness were consistent lyrical themes for Mr. Tyson. The Wonder of It All, for example, mourned a lost age: “The golden West has come and gone, right before our very eyes.” In his music, Mr. Tyson, the bard of buckaroos, romanticized the very life he lived.

He is survived by son, Clay Tyson; daughter, Adelita Tyson Bell; and granddaughter, Mesa Bell.