The Seein’ Red Blues

The Seein’ Red Blues

“Cowboys are always depicted as easygoing. Not me,” says 56-year-old Weatherford, Texas, songwriter Don Edwards. Meaning? “I’m the cowboy from hell. Good Lord, in the old days, if you weren’t pissed, you weren’t a singer at all.” Edwards decries cowboy-hobbling enviros and pesky bureaucrats in favorites like “Rancher’s Song”:

The rancher is the man
that feeds us all, but…
It’s a wonder he don’t die.
The taxman is the man
that gets it all.

Equally miffed is Carl Klang of Colton, Oregon, the militia movement’s Dan Fogelberg. In easy-listening albums with names like “Watch Out for Martial Law,” Klang, 42, wails about pushy greens, the FBI, and, of course, gun laws:

They say they want to
take my guns
To save me from myself.
Am I a threat to national security
Or their one-world
commonwealth?

“The music business feeds people’s hedonistic lower levels–the lust, the drinking, the divorces,” says Klang. “Music should lift people. But the godlessness continues.”