The Western Folklife Center will launch its latest Deep West Records CD, a tribute to the 1950s cowboy band Snake River Outlaws, in a concert with western swing band Wylie & the Wild West, on Sunday, August 24, in Missoula, Montana. The concert is part of the River City Roots Festival, a free event in downtown Missoula, and will take place from 1:45 to 3:15 pm.
Following the concert, from 3:30 to 5:30 pm, the Missoula Art Museum will host a reception for the performers. The concert is presented by the Western Folklife Center and its Deep West Records label, in conjunction with the River City Roots Festival and the Missoula Art Museum.
In addition, Montana Public Radio and the Western Folklife Center will present a special half-hour documentary, A Snake River Outlaws Retrospective, on Monday, August 18 at 8:30 pm Mountain Time. Listen to the Retrospective.
The concert and CD pay tribute to the Snake River Outlaws, one of the hottest honky-tonk cowboy bands in the Northwest during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Members of the original band will join Wylie & The Wild West lead guitar player Scot Wilburn, whose father and uncle were original members of the Outlaws. Jimmy Widner of Darby, Montana, will be there with his fiddle; and Orval Fochtman, the original lead singer for the group, will travel to Missoula from Weiser, Idaho.The Snake River Outlaws played live every Saturday night from the Sunshine Bar on the corner of Woody and Alder in Missoula, and were broadcast live on KXLL radio. The Western Folklife Center CD contains rare digitally re-mastered recordings of live radio shows the Outlaws recorded in Missoula around 1950, in a sound capsule of a time when cowboys, railroaders, college students, college ladies and vagabonds all hoisted mugs of beer to fine music and western sociability.
"While juke boxes and radio and television could bring music to these more rural areas, there was still a great demand for live music, particularly for dances," explains Western Folklife Center Executive Director Charlie Seemann. "In many cases, this role was filled by local journeyman musicians who learned and performed the current hits. These hardworking community musicians, often overlooked by country music historians, were the bedrock of the genre and deserve much more credit and attention than they have received."
Read the press release. Buy the CD in our online gift shop.
The concert and CD are made possible with the generous support of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, with additional support from the R. Harold Burton Foundation and the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation.
