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Reprinted with permission of Creative Loafing
Record Review by Gregory Nicoll
COWBOY ENVY
Real Cowboy Girl
Niki Viki Music As proud owner of a souvenir jacket from The Rifleman, I confess to more than
a little "cowboy envy" myself; and I'll also admit that my record collection
is heavier on Frankie Laine and Tex Ritter than Elvis or the Beatles. Raised in an
era when Matt Dillon was a pistol-packer not a brat-packer, I grew up loving songs
about sagebrush and six-guns. This musical genre falls into three distinct subcategories.
First, there are Actual Frontier Ditties, most of them rewritten renditions of Irish
folk ballads and old sea chanteys. You don't find many of those on Real Cowboy Girl,
the new CD by the all-female Atlanta trio Cowboy Envy, but you will discover a heapin'
helping from the second subcategory: Rodeo & Chuck Wagon Tunes from the Singing
Cowboy Era. Wrapping their deliciously smooth Andrews Sisters-style harmonies around Gene
Autry's "Back in the Saddle Again," Cowboy Envy provide the next best thing
to the l9th century. (Autry may have been a cheeseball, but unlike most boob tube
buckaroos, at least he wrote of frontier hand-guns with the proper caliber of .44-40,
not the military .45!) "Real Cowboy Girl" is even better suited to this
estrogenic ensemble - it's a gen-u-ine '30s tune in which a woman fantasizes about
men's gear ("I want to wear a ten-gallon hat, And a belt that is four inches
wide"). This might provide the trio a perfect theme song if their own "Cowboy
Envy" (which lead singer "Frenchy" Poliakoff wrote in perfect mimicry
of the style, complete with yodels) didn't already fill the bill. Another original, "Born To Be Branded," is composed from the cow's point
of view and packs a feminist punch ("At the end of a fiery stick... a cow has
no say!"); but "Cool Water" showcases the trio's beautiful ensemble
singing and backup harmonies, underscored by instrumentation that's tastefully understated
(the sole exception being DeDe "Too Short" Vogt's electric bass, which
kicks like a loaded Colt). There are a few misfires on the disc - "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" is pretty
instead of gritty, and Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In" is overly familiar
(even Clint Eastwood recorded it) - but "Buffalo K" Hatfield's solo reading
of "Home on the Range" is truly stunning, no matter how well-trampled its
lyric path. The third and final subcategory of cattle-trail tunes is the Absurd Macho Movie
Theme, and the Envy bunch delivers the great grandma of them all: "High Ridin'
Woman. Often incorrectly attributed to the Sons of the Pioneers (as it is here, in
David Chamberlain's otherwise excellent liner notes), this male-chauvinist antique
was actually written by film composer Harry Sukinan for the 1957 CinemaScope bulletfest
Forty Guns, the most bizarre gender-switched western of its decade (yup, even more
bent than Johnny Guitar) in which a black-clad Barbara Stanwyck kept her personal
posse of pistoleros in line with the lash of her bullwhip. When the three throats
of Cowboy Envy wrap their heavenly harmonies around this number ("She commands
and men obey/They're just putty in her hands so they say"), the threesome burns
hot as branding irons.
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