Wylie and the Wild West

He’s a rancher and horse trainer from the Cross Three Ranch just outside the tiny town of Dusty, Washington, population eleven. He lives and works in southeastern Washington’s Palouse Hills, a region best known for the deepest topsoil in the world. His music thrills working cowboys and Seattle nightclubbers alike. Wylie Gustafson and his four-piece band, Wylie and the Wild West, play what they call “fine Western music.” It’s a blend of County &Western, cowboy, Western swing, and American folk music that defies genre but inspires diverse audiences, east, west, and in between. Wylie himself is perhaps best known as North America’s premier Western-style yodeler. His is the “Do you Yahoo-o-o?” yodel heard in the Yahoo.com ads.

Wylie is forty-two years old. He was born in the Chinook Arch region, in the eastern foothills of the Rockies, near the town of Cut Bank, in northern Montana. His father was a veterinarian and cattle rancher, and Wylie grew up tending livestock from horseback at an early age. He was born into a musical family and his father, Rib Gustafson, sang, played guitar, and had quite a regional reputation as a yodeler. Wylie took up the guitar as a child and often made music with other members of his family. A serious musical career began in the early 1980s. After taping a video that featured his singing and yodeling virtuosity for Country Music Television, he gathered up a band and began to tour. His first recordings followed soon after. In 1984, he met his wife, Kimberley, who lived on her parents’ ranch near Dusty. After their marriage, Wylie moved there and took over the operation, raising, and training cutting and roping horses and maintaining a small herd of cattle. He still competes in rodeo team-roping and cutting-horse events. He won first place in the 2002 and 2003 British Columbia Cutting Horse Futurity and his team won the team-roping event at the 1998 Reba McIntire Pro Celebrity Rodeo in Guthrie, Oklahoma, in 1998.

Wylie is also an expert songwriter, and he writes many of the songs that he and the “Wild West” sing. In between, however, they perform Western standards like “Spurs That Jingle, Jangle, Jingle” and “Cattle Call.” They also put their own spin on Country & Western classics like Hank Snow’s “The Gal Who Invented Kissin’ “ and even on folk-rock tunes, such as Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country.” Wylie’s original material, however, largely reflects his ranch life.

Wylie’s style, although diverse, is probably closest to and most inclusive of Western swing. This genre originated in Texas and California during the 1930s, as local dance bands with fiddle lead began to introduce rhythms and other instruments from the jazz they heard on records and radio. The traditional polkas, waltzes, and two-steps brought into Texas by immigrants from central Europe merged with an uptown flavor and gave rise to the sounds made popular throughout the West by Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

The origin of the cowboy yodel is in dispute. Most likely it is a result of what anthropologists call “syncretism,” where a culture is exposed to outside influences, picks them up, blends and alters them, and makes them its own. In the days of the open range, cowpunchers sometimes had to holler and whoop to control great herds, always in danger of stampeding. Many of the earliest cowboys were Southerners, both white and black. Many would have been familiar with the African-derived “hollers” used to communicate across distance in Southern fields and river valleys. In the Alps, herders also used the yodel for long-distance communication. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, traveling medicine shows brought a variety of entertainment to the rural West, including some very popular troupes of Swiss yodelers. Pioneer Country recording artist Jimmie Rodgers worked the African-American blues moan into a style he called a “blue yodel,” which was immediately imitated by the singing cowboys of the silver screen, especially Gene Autry. This forever etched the image of the yodeling cowboy into the popular imagination. All these influences can be heard in Wylie’s virtuoso yodel.

When home on the ranch, Wylie still gets up every morning to feed the cattle, and he makes sure that he is home often enough so that he and Kimberley can maintain the regular schedule that training good cow horses demands. He has appeared on numerous venues, including the Grand Ole Opry, the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, the Pendleton Round-Up, the National Folk Festival, Seattle’s Bumbershoot, the Calgary Stampede, France’s Euro-Disney, Las Vegas’s Sahara Inn, Lincoln Center, and numerous state fairs, rodeos, and livestock shows, and cattlemen’s conventions. His seventh record, Paradise, just came out on the Rounder label.

Jens Lund
Folk Arts Program
Washington State Arts Commission

Additional Resources

Millennium Stage Home Page

Watch Past Performances

10/8/03: Wylie and the Wild West

Wylie and the Wild West blend western swing, classic country, cowboy, and folk as a backdrop to the crooning of cowboy poetry by rancher Wylie Gustafson.

Wylie and the Wild West

Wylie and the Wild West blend western swing, classic country, cowboy, and folk as a backdrop to the crooning of cowboy poetry by rancher Wylie Gustafson.

Comment, rate, and more...

Performances

Search by Date

Annual Events

Search by Category

Visit these areas of our website:

Tickets

Buy a Ticket

Subscribe

Customer Help

Box Office

Contribute

Give Now

Support Us

Get Involved

Visit

The Kennedy Center

Area Information

The Venues

Area Map

Explore the Arts

Videos

Live Broadcasts

Interactives

Artists

Blogs

Education

Performances & Events

Arts & Schools

Career Development

VSA and Accessibility

Arts Management

About

A Living Memorial

Our People

Wylie and the Wild West

Additional Resources

Watch Past Performances

Comments