Willie Nelson: Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other (2006)

 |   |  1 min read

Willie Nelson: Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other (2006)

When this Willie Nelson song started to get a bit of attention around the time of the movie Brokeback Mountain, many people -- myself included -- assumed it had been prompted by that film.

But the story of it goes back quite a way and the song's writer Ned Sublette tells it in his excellent book The Year Before the Flood about his time in New Orleans before Katrina and the flooding.

Sublette had written the song in '81 and at one point -- when Kinky Friedman was going to make a movie of his novel A Case of Lone Star -- the three of them were going to record it: "But it never happened."

"I premiered it for an audience of no more than 20 in a SoHo basement performance space called InRoads," writes Sublette, "accompanied by George Lewis on sousaphone. The next gig I did someone requested the song. It went on like that, taking a life of its own from the beginning."

He says he'd composed it on the family piano when he was back home from New York visiting his folks in Portales at the height of the Urban Cowboy phase.

"I was inspired by being back in the Land of Protestant Repression, and by God, I do know how a West Texas waltz should sound. I made a good recording of it in '84 in Lubbock for an album I made with Lloyd Maines and my band that cost a fuckwad of money and never came out (never mind).

"Then one night in 1987 my friend Tony Garnier slipped Willie a cassette of the song when they coincided on Saturday Night Live. It became a Willie Nelson band bus favourite immediately. Willie started mentioning it in interviews, to my dropped-jaw astonshment. But he'd never recorded it."

Then 17 years later, prompted by Brokeback Mountain, Willie did. The people putting together the music for the movie turned it down "because it was a funny song and they were making a tear-jerking movie. But you know, the song isn't all that funny. It depends on how you do it."

Sublette says that at the same time as he heard Willie had recorded it he (Ned Sublette) received a Guggenheim fellowship.

"I seem to remember that at the end of the reception, after multiple glasses of wine, I sang Cowboys are Frequently Secretly in its entirety, a cappella, in full voice, to a circle of people.

"I think." 

For more oddities, one-offs or songs with an interesting backstory use the RSS feed for daily updates, and check the massive back-catalogue at From the Vaults.

Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   From the Vaults articles index

Steve Allen and Shona Laing: Brother and Sister (1974?)

Steve Allen and Shona Laing: Brother and Sister (1974?)

Steve Allen (Alan Stephenson) is best – and perhaps only – known for his hit Join Together which was chosen as the anthem for the Commonwealth Games held in Christchurch in 1974.... > Read more

Coast: Why; A Peace Medley (1970)

Coast: Why; A Peace Medley (1970)

The war in Vietnam threw up hundreds of songs -- taking about every political position imaginable -- but this track is interesting as an early example of a musical montage.  Not a... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

ROLLING STONE: STORIES FROM THE EDGE, a TV doco series by ALEX GIBNEY and BLAIR FOSTER

ROLLING STONE: STORIES FROM THE EDGE, a TV doco series by ALEX GIBNEY and BLAIR FOSTER

When Jann Wenner launched Rolling Stone magazine in late 1967 his avowed intention was to take the emerging rock culture and its artists seriously as voice from and for the counterculture.... > Read more

TIGI NESS INTERVIEWED (2003): From street warrior to natural mystic

TIGI NESS INTERVIEWED (2003): From street warrior to natural mystic

The high-rise skyline shimmers in the summer heat beyond the faded iron roofs of Auckland's inner-city suburbs. Tigi Ness sits on the back porch of his Grey Lynn home, in the foreground a tended... > Read more