By CATHERINE ELLERTON
Moapa Valley Progress
The lone figure stood on the stage and, with only a guitar to accompany her, shared a cowboy’s life in a Cowboy Christmas Concert on Monday night, Dec. 19, at the Old Logandale School.
Mary Kaye, a singer song/writer who received the 2013 Female Performer and Songwriter of the Year Award by the Western Music Association for her song “Ride A Wide Circle,” regaled the audience with her songs that explain the Cowboy-way of life.
Many of the songs she writes are based on her own life. Mary Kaye said that she comes from communities whose zip codes are “E-I-E-I-O.” She married, had a family and began her singing career mid-life. Although she sang in choirs since the 4th grade, she did not get serious until later in life. She picked up the guitar in her late 30s and learned how to play from the internet.
This performer intersperses her musical numbers with easy banter and stories of the west. One of the first songs she wrote was a delightful “Santa’s Round-Up.” She explained that the difference between Western and Country music is that, if you play Country music backwards you get your wife back, your life back, etc. If you play Western music backwards, you get your horse back. She then performed several old trail songs honoring those stories of a way of life as told in music.
Her songs are very pure, sung with a clear soprano and are enhanced with beautiful accompaniment, a rich personality and the ability to combine ballads, cowboy swing and yodeling.
Mary Kaye stated that she reads Western history to get a story for a song. She also uses her family’s history on her mother’s side, who were from Mexico, for inspiration. A very emotional “Come Gather Round The Angel Tree” was written to honor the gifts of a stranger’s love in helping her family.
She offered a very cleaver “Cowboys Twelve Days of Christmas” which included five Brahma Bulls, seven lariats, nine red bandanas and twelve buckaroos. In explaining Cowboy Life, she said there are no medical problems as long as you have baling twine, Super Glue and udder balm.
One of the most inspiring songs of the evening, in this reporter’s mind, was a song “It All Began In A Barn” – that first Christmas Day. If you enter an old barn, or building, that is decaying and you sit there and watch the sun come through the slats of the roof and then later the stars shining through those same slats, you understand why it is a “Dusty Cathedral.”
In talking with the artist before the program to obtain her New Year’s Resolutions or thoughts, Mary Kaye stated that she hopes to reach more people through her music with whom it resonates. She likes to think of the often broken resolutions as a bucket list of simple life choices which makes it easier to accomplish.
