This old cowpoke keeps singing along.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

In "The Campfire Has Gone Out," a wistful cowboy song about lost values and a vanishing lifestyle, there's a line that goes like this:

"We let it slip away and wonder who's to blame."

If cowboy music slides off into the sunset in our times, Texas troubadour Don Edwards will not be the one to blame. A tireless researcher, songwriter, concert performer and recording artist, Edwards is determined to keep the campfire alive during his shift.

In a performing career that stretches back to 1961, Edwards has made two albums that are now in the Folklore Archives at the Library of Congress. He won an INDIE Award for best folk-traditional album, twice won the Cowboy Hall of Fame's Wrangler Award for traditional Western music, played a character much like himself alongside Robert Redford in "The Horse Whisperer" and won multiple awards from the Western Music Association as male vocalist and performer of the year.

`A pure American art form'

Edwards considers cowboy songs "a pure American art form," even though many of the best traditional tunes migrated here from some small islands on the far side of the Atlantic.

Cowboys took old ballads from England, Scotland and Ireland and changed the lyrics "to suit their own selves," Edwards said in a telephone interview.

Along with songs reflecting the way they lived and worked, Edwards says, cowboys also were fond of sentimental popular songs such as "When You and I Were Young, Maggie."

In the double CD "Don Edwards: Last of the Troubadours," subtitled "Saddle Songs II," Edwards sings 32 songs, more than half of them traditional numbers of undetermined authorship. One of these is "Red River Valley," which has more verses than you're likely to have heard before and goes by many different names, including "The Bright Sherman Valley," which places it in New York state.

Among the traditional songs, three are especially rich with cowhand vernacular and dust-dry humor:

"The Sierry Petes," also known as "Tying Knots in the Devil's Tail."

"Windy Bill," about a top roper who met his match in an "old black steer that ran down in the draw" and subsequently "paid his debt like a gentle man, without a bit of jaw."

"I Wanted to Die in the Desert," a lament by a cowboy who was caught out of place when "death pulled his freight into town.'

Another song that rings true is "Night Rider's Lament," in which a lone cowhand on the graveyard shift stops in the light of the moon to read a letter from a friend back home:

"Why do you ride for your money/ Why do you rope for short pay?" the friend asks. "You ain't gettin' nowhere/ And you're losing your share/ Oh, you must have gone crazy out there."

After reading on, about a woman he knew who's now "the perfect professional's wife," the cowboy answers:

"They've never seen the northern lights/ They've never seen a hawk on the wing/ They've never seen spring hit the Great Divide/ No, they've never heard camp cookie sing."

This pure cowboy song is not traditional, however, but con- temporary, written by Mike Burton.

"That's as good a contemporary cowboy song as ever's been written," Edwards says.

Another example he gave was "The Cowboy Song" by Roy Robinson, recorded first by Edwards and later by Garth Brooks.

"When I did it, Roy got a carton of Marlboros," Edwards says, chuckling. "After Garth recorded it, Roy bought a ranch."

No one wrote this stuff down

Old cowboy music is pretty much an oral tradition, Edwards says. The lyrics were passed down and altered along the way by sometimes illiterate or uneducated cowboys "who could care less about writing it down."

This makes the real stuff more and more difficult to find, he says.

"It's hard to today to get it firsthand," he says. "The last real cowboy singers, people 10 or 20 years older than I am, they got it firsthand."

When cowboy songs first came off the range and into town, Edwards says, they were sung by non-cowboy performers in medicine shows, barbershops, tent shows and saloons. Venues included the White Elephant in Fort Worth, Texas, where John Lomax recorded many of the songs for his 1910 collection, "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads."

Edwards makes a distinction between real cowboy music and the more romantic Western songs popularized by cowboy movie crooners such as Gene Autry and Tex Ritter.

As a kid growing up in a New Jersey farming community, Edwards was influenced not only by such movies, but also by the Western novels of Will James.

"He was a sure-enough cowboy," Edwards says, "but he romanticized it enough to make it interesting to young people."

James' books definitely appealed to Edwards, who started playing guitar

when he was 10. He left home when he was 16 to work in Texas and New Mexico. Back then, he says, he was "just a greenhorn kid, a close observer."

But his experience working for an oil field supply hauler and on some ranches gave him a more realistic appreciation of Western life, an appreciation that he carried with him when he began his career as a singer, actor and stuntman at Six Flags Over Texas in 1961.

He thinks the enduring appeal of cowboy music lies in the cowboy archetype.

"The cowboy was the greatest hero America has ever produced," he says. "There's a sense of individualism there. The cowboy had a work ethic and a moral code, and across the board many people like that and want to be that way.

`The actual persona of the cowboy has been instilled in the souls of most Americans."

CONCERT PREVIEW

Don Edwards, cowboy singer and songwriter

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Shedd, 285 E. Broadway

Tickets: $24.50, $19.50 and $16.50; call 687-6526 or [phone]

Also: "Saddle Songs" workshop, 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Shedd Chapel, $25, $20 with the purchase of a concert ticket

CAPTION(S):

Don Edwards grew up in rural New Jersey before moving west where he gained an appreciation for the cowboy way of life.