Steagall Depicts Cowboy Way
Of Life In Songs And Poems

By Colleen Schreiber

WEATHERFORD — Red Steagall is considered by many to be one of the greatest cowboy poets and country and western singer/songwriters of his time.

Steagall has entertained all over the world, but he says he’s most at home entertaining a bunch of cowboys around a chuckwagon campfire in West Texas.

A sentimental optimist, Steagall chooses only to see the bright side of things.

"A friend of mine says I never have a bad day. Some are better than others," he admits, "but I never have a bad one. And if you don’t think that every day is important, just try skipping one."

His philosophy is to live life to the fullest, and to be a leader rather than a follower.

"I like a change of scenery, and the scenery changes only for the steer that is in the lead," Steagall says. "And if I’m being run out of town, I like to make it look like I’m leading the parade."

Russell Don "Red" Steagall was born in Gainesville. His ancestors were among those who left the Old South after the Civil War in search of a place to begin anew.

"Texas was still the West, it was still unexplored, still new, and school lands were free for homesteading. The cattle business was good, the agriculture industry was in its infancy. There was lots of opportunity for people in that part of the world to come this way," Steagall explains.

Steagall’s direct descendents came to Texas from Tennessee and Arkansas in the late 1800s. His paternal grandfather was a groceryman who settled in North Texas in Montague County. His maternal grandparents were farmers. That side of the family had always been farmers, and Steagall has deeds of family farms that date back to the 1700s.

When Steagall was three, his father moved the family to the Panhandle, where he took a job in the oilfields. Steagall grew up in Sanford, a small town on the south side of the Canadian River between Borger and Amarillo.

Steagall says the love of the land and love of livestock, particularly horses, was bred into him.

"I loved horses. I never cared anything about owning an automobile, I just wanted a horse and a saddle to sit in instead of a McClellan," he says. "That’s all we could afford. You could buy them in an army surplus catalog for $14 and it would take us four or five years to save up enough money to buy one. We didn’t have good saddles to ride those old stringy broncs."

His mother was his first grade teacher, and she retired after 38 years in the same school district.

"There’s nobody in the world that I respect more than my mother," Steagall says. "The things she gave to me that are most important are first of all, her love, total love. She also taught me how to speak and write correctly."

Another important talent of sorts that his mother helped cultivate was his daydreaming.

"Mother never told me to quit daydreaming. She encouraged me to make up those stories. I guess she saw something that maybe was a little bit unusual.

"There was an old well casing out by the schoolhouse," he recalls, "and every minute that I didn’t have some kind of chore to do I was sitting on that well casing looking out across that river country, daydreaming and making up stories. "I loved Indians and cowboys too. One day I might ride with Quanah Parker and fight the white eyes, and the next day I’m going up the trail with Goodnight to Dodge City."

Steagall went to high school at Phillips and was an all-star football player for the Phillips Blackhawks. By his junior year he had already signed a letter of intent to play for Texas A&M University, where a football scholarship would help him accomplish his goal at the time — to become a veterinarian.

In his junior year he was a starting left end on an All State football team. The morning before his first game, he woke up in excruciating pain with a terrible headache. Steagall was diagnosed with polio, the paralysis centered in his left arm. The doctors sent him to Plainview, which was the foremost polio center in the U.S.

When he arrived, the only room available was in the iron lung ward. There were 14 kids in that unit, and the experience changed his life forever.

"They put those iron lung machines in a circle. The kids all had mirrors above their heads. The nurses would hold the cards and those kids would play cards," Steagall recalls.

"I was in there about 30 minutes, and I told them that they could send me home, that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. I could live with one arm."

To this day, Steagall has only partial use of his left arm.

Polio ended his football career, but he still had a desire to be a veterinarian. Without the football scholarship, however, going to a large university seemed financially unrealistic. Tom Tipps, an assistant to legendary coach Bear Bryant, offered him a job as an assistant trainer on the football squad, and Steagall was sure that was the answer to his prayers. He assumed that being an assistant trainer meant a paying job.

It didn’t, and Steagall’s limited funds ran out after two weeks, so he returned to the Panhandle and enrolled at West Texas State University. He received a degree in animal science and agronomy and earned a coveted appointment to the vet school at A&M, but by that time he was tired of putting himself through school, working day and night. He had a degree, so decided to go to work.

He took a job with Western Grain and Supply Company in Amarillo for $1.25 an hour, $40 a week take-home pay. He began by fumigating the large grain storage barns and shortly he graduated to the sales department. From there he took a job with Shamrock Oil and Gas, where in time he was responsible for setting up anhydrous ammonia fertilizer dealerships all through the Plains.

After a couple of years, Steagall realized that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life selling fertilizer. His real dream was to be in show business.

"I hooked a 5x10 U-Haul to my ’64 Supersports Impala convertible and went to California."

Steagall was musically inclined. His mother had bought him a mandolin from a lady who lived just outside of town.

"I’ll never forget how my mom paid off that mandolin a dollar a month out of her teaching salary," Steagall says.

For graduation she bought him a guitar, and later while in college he put a band together and played college and rodeo dances. Before long he was writing songs.

In California, some of his good friends, Don Lanier, Jimmy Bowen and Buddy Knox, had a band called The Rhythm Orchids. Steagall says they were the ones who invented "rock-a-billy" music, the precurser to rock and roll.

"Without them there might not have been a Buddy Holly or an Elvis Presley."

His first year in California, Steagall sold industrial chemicals and wrote songs in his free time. During that time Steagall and Donnie Lanier wrote their first big hit, "Here We Go Again," which Ray Charles recorded.

Another friend, Eddie Reeves, who is now vice president and general manager of Warner Records in Nashville, was in New York working for United Artists Music. He offered Steagall a job in UA’s Hollywood publishing office. He stayed with them for about a year, and then he and Jimmy Bowen put together their own publishing company, which Steagall still owns today. Steagall ran his publishing company until 1969 and then started recording himself.

Steagall says he has two real heroes in the music business, the late Jim Reeves and the late Tex Ritter.

"To Jim I was just a kid, an acquaintance who he saw out on the road every now and then, but to me Jim Reeves was my buddy. He always took time to spend time with me. I would send him songs and I always knew that I would get a response from him," Steagall says. "He’s largely responsible for me doing what I do."

Steagall says he admired Tex Ritter because he was a true gentleman who was always willing to help anyone.

Musically, he says he probably admired Bob Wills more than anyone.

"We could get one station in Sanford, and that was KDDD in Dumus. There was only one hour of country music a day and a guy named Cactus Smith had a show called Tumbleweed Temples. He played nothing but Hank Thompson, Bob Wills and Spade Cooley.

"I didn’t think there was any other kind of music. I used to tell people I was 25 years old before I knew there was anything in the world other than Phillips gasoline, mesquite trees, buffalo grass, ‘bob wire’ and Bob Wills. I was also 25 before someone convinced me that Clovis, New Mexico, wasn’t one of the seven wonders of the natural world."

Steagall says he liked the excitement of Hollywood but it was never home. "I always felt like I was visiting, and I knew I would never stay," he remarks, "but it was a time period that I wouldn’t take anything for."

Steagall moved from Hollywood to Nashville in 1973 and stayed there for four years before moving back to Texas.

"Nashville is a wonderful place. I do a lot of business there, I have a lot of wonderful friends there, but it’s not for me. I really am a West Texan," he says. "When it comes to living day to day, that’s where my heart is and where I really belong; that’s where I identify the most.

"People west of Fort Worth have a different view of life," he continues. "It’s a conservative attitude with a liberal view. You’ll find those true values of honesty, integrity, hard work, dedication to family, convictions to belief in God ... You’ll find more of that in West Texas than any other place."

Steagall’s admiration for cowboys, the cowboy way of life and their love of the land started when he was a young child. He learned his first song, "When The Work’s All Done This Fall," when he was three.

"Daddy used to sit around and sing those cowboy songs, but Mom taught me that first song."
Two childhood heroes, Steagall says, helped shape his life. Lou Steen, who in later life was janitor of the school, built a cabin on a creek where Sanford now stands. He trapped coyotes and wolves for the federal government and many years later he taught the young Steagall how to trap coyotes and bobcats and where to look for Indian ruins, arrowheads and other Indian artifacts.

"He was my mother’s best friend and my best friend," Steagall says. One of the greatest lessons he learned from his best friend had to do with the time his brand new bicycle was accidentally run over.

"I’d worked all summer on a paper route at $3 a month to pay for this bicycle," Steagall recalls. "It was a green 26-inch Western Flyer. I was devastated when it got run over. Lou sat me down on the porch and enlightened me with these words of wisdom. He said, ‘The things that happen to you that are good are to make life enjoyable today. The things that happen to you that are bad are to toughen you up for tomorrow.’"

His other childhood hero was W.D. "Wilbur" Moss, who had been a cowboy most of his life until he married and his wife made him settle down and get a "real" job.

"W.D. was the best shade tree veterinarian I’ve ever known," Steagall says. "He could fix your dog or horse; didn’t matter what was wrong with them, he could fix them."

Over the span of his 30-year career, Steagall has had more than 200 of his songs recorded and has written more than a thousand. He’s also had 26 records in a row on the national charts. His cowboy poetry has been just as successful.

Calling himself an observer, Steagall says few of his stories develop from personal real life experience, though lots of times there are other people behind his cowboy poetry.

"Papaw," for instance, was written after listening in on a conversation one year at the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Convention in San Antonio.

"I was talking to one of the brand inspectors, Eddie Forman, and a lady came up and said, ‘Eddie, how’s that new grandson?’ Eddie said, ‘Oh he’s doing good.’ She said, ‘Is he talking yet?" He said, ‘No, and I know the first words he’s going to say are Mama and Daddy, but I’m going to make sure that the first full sentence that he makes is, ‘I did it ‘cause my papaw said I could.’

"I couldn’t get away from Eddie fast enough to get to my room. That poem just poured out of me," Steagall says. "I saw that whole picture and just wrote it as I saw the picture."

"The Fence That Me and Shorty Built" did come from two personal experiences.

"When I was growing up my biggest deal was to save 56 cents so I could buy a box of .22 long rifle hollowpoints so I could hunt rabbits to feed my coon dogs and greyhounds," Steagall recalls. "It would take weeks and weeks to save up 56 cents to buy that box.

"Leonard Whiteside, a local rancher, offered me 50 cents a day to dig postholes in that old rough, rocky country. Boy, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, and I thought I was stealing him blind," he says. "I just knew there would never be another poor day.

"I didn’t have enough money to buy a pair of gloves, and that first evening I came in my hands were blistered and I was sore and complaining. I said, ‘Mother I think it’s worth more money than that,’ and mother said, ‘You have a couple of choices. You can either quit or you can ask Mr. Whiteside for a raise. And if he doesn’t think it’s worth a raise, you still have two choices. You can either quit or you can work your tail off and do what you told him you’d do in the first place.’ I never forgot that."

The other lesson had to do with an experience while working on his uncle’s farm in Iowa. Every summer from the time he was in the seventh grade until he was a senior in high school, Steagall spent his summers in Iowa.

"I probably learned more there than any other time in my life," Steagall says. "I learned an awful lot about figuring things out and seeing a situation in its entirety instead of just piece by piece."

The other experience which was the basis for this particular poem occurred one day while driving down the road with his uncle Floyd.

"My uncle Floyd said, ‘I wished Mr. Cornwall would teach those boys to plow those corn rows straight.’ I looked over at Mr. Cornwall’s rows and those rows were going every which way and I looked over at our side of the road and our rows were straight as an arrow. I looked over at my uncle and said, ‘Uncle Floyd, what difference does it make? The corn is going to grow either way.’ He got red in the face and said, ‘It makes a difference to me. I don’t care what other people think, I want to know that I’m a good farmer.’

"From that I learned that it needs to be important to you first. If you’re not true to yourself, then you can’t be true to anyone else."

Another of his poems, "Ride For the Brand" and also the title of his first book, which was published in 1993, was based on a time when he and Don Malone were visiting the Waggoner Ranch at Vernon.

"It was a Saturday night and we were at the old Cedar Top Camp, and the cowboys came by to play penny ante poker," Steagall recalls. "They were sitting around the table talking about the brand this and the brand that, and Jim Patterson said, ‘You know, those are our cattle, boys. You know the Waggoner family gets the money, but we’re the ones that feed them, we’re the ones that calve them. They’re our cattle.’

"I walked out in front of that old lodge — it was colder than blue blazes — and wrote ‘Ride for the Brand.’"

Steagall says the framework of his poems usually comes quickly. "Then I’ll worry it maybe for two or three months before I publish it."

In April 1994, Steagall launched a one hour syndicated radio show, "Cowboy Country," on 140 stations in 43 states and two provinces of Canada. "Cowboy Corner," he says, celebrates the lifestyle of the American West through the poems, songs and stories of the cowboy.

"The true cowboys are still the true cowboys," Steagall says. "Most of them grew up on the ranches and followed in the footsteps of their granddaddies and their daddies. To really learn the skills and to be a good cowboy you have to grow up with it. You have to have a sixth sense about what that horse or that cow is going to do."

Though the way of the world is changing, Steagall doesn’t worry that the values of the "true" cowboy will remain generation after generation.

"In the days of the open range, the pipeline of communication was the line riders. If a guy was a liar, cheat or a thief, his reputation would precede him to the next cow camp and he couldn’t get a job.

"That left a group of people who were totally dedicated to their way of life, who were fiercely loyal to their employer, who believed in putting in a day’s work for a day’s pay."

Steagall knows those people are still on the ranches and those same values are still instilled in their children generation after generation.

"I don’t worry about the cowmen losing those values. I worry about the rest of the world losing them."

Steagall has an impressive list of accomplishments. He is a two-time winner of the Western Heritage Award for original music from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, was named the official Cowboy Poet of Texas by the Texas Legislature, held major roles in a couple of motion pictures and produced the motion picture, "Big Bad John." He’s been a guest at the White House numerous times and in 1991 was invited to recite the Cowboy’s Prayer at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC.

His favorite time, Steagall says, has been the last 20 years since he’s been married to wife Gail. "If there’s anybody in the world that’s married, it’s me and happy about it," he says. "She’s truly my best friend and the only woman I’ve ever wanted to spend the rest of my life with."

Though not boasting, Steagall says he’s not surprised that he’s where he is today. "I knew what I wanted to do. I had a plan. I didn’t know how long it would take me, but I knew what I wanted."

And he wouldn’t change a thing. "I learned valuable lessons from every single thing that has happened to me that was undesirable. To me there’s no such thing as failure. Maybe it didn’t work out quite like I planned, but it’s not a failure; I just needed to take a different direction. I never make mistakes, but I find opportunities to learn."

Had it not been for the polio, Steagall says he likely wouldn’t have the drive he has today.

"I wouldn’t have needed to make a place for myself that was different from everyone else. I might have just followed the herd, but because I was different I had to do something different. So I found ways that set me apart from the herd. It’s been a challenge, but challenges are fun," Steagall says.