Sons Of The San Joaquin - 15 Years: A Retrospective (2002)

Tracklist

01. Happy Cowboy
02. Timber Trail
03. The Gift
04. Great American Cowboy
05. Along the Santa Fe Trail
06. Song of the Rover
07. Wyoming on My Mind
08. Is It Because
09. Anything but a Cowboy
10. From Whence Came the Cowboy
11. I Ride Along and Dream
12. Charlie and the Boys
13. Texas Plains
14. Utah (with One Eye)
15. Ghost Riders in the Sky
16. The Legend of Jake Kincaid

If a group can stay together for 15 years, that's reason enough to celebrate. If that group, like the Sons of the San Joaquin, specializes in keeping music from a bygone era alive, the feat is even more special. Fifteen Years: A Retrospective celebrates three singers' commitment to the wide-open plains, cattle roundups, and drinking coffee from a tin cup. As with the Sons of the Pioneers, the band -- Jack, Joe, and Lon Hannah -- fill their romantic odes with lots of close harmony and spare arrangements. Familiar fare -- "Happy Cowboy," "Song of the Rover," and "Ghost Riders in the Sky" -- mesh with a number of Jack Hannah originals to fashion an album as easy rolling as the prairie wind. The group's vision of the west is a romantic one: cacti, dusty trails, campfires, coyotes, and ponies litter the landscape. The cowboy might be punching cattle to the day he dies, as in "Utah," but he wouldn't have it any other way. If a song is titled "Anything but a Cowboy," one can be sure that the phrase will be qualified by, "That's why I'll never want to be." For anyone with an interest in '30s and '40s cowboy music, Fifteen Years: A Retrospective offers an excellent introduction to one of the best Western revival bands.

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