rhinestones make the man

I hope posting this, from the current issue of the New Yorker, is OK with brilliant cartoonist Roz Chast.  

Fay Ward – cowboy, writer, designer

I can still hardly believe I got a Fay Ward outfit last week.

It’s a light green wool gabardine shirt, and pant in the same green wool herringbone used for the yokes, cuffs and flaps on the shirt.

Fay Ward made clothes, but he was more of a cowboy than a rodeo tailor like Nudie or Rodeo Ben. According to How the West Was Worn, Ward was the son of Wild West show performers, grew up working on ranches and went in rodeos between 1909 and 1922.

Chicago country band The Sundowners-Curtis Delaney, Bob Boyd and Don Walls, wore a lot of Fay Ward clothes.

During the Depression, Ward did illustrations for a cowboy tailor in New York City. He then opened is own little shop on West 48th, hiring sewers and another ex-cowboy named Nevada Dick, who had become a tailor.

Ward wrote a book in the 1920s called The Cowboy At Work. When it was finally published in 1958, he sold the tailoring business and left New York for Arizona.

Westernwear with his label continued to be made, so it’s hard to say without exact dates whether Ward himself was involved in a particular outfit. This shirt, also worn by the Sundowners, is dated circa 1970.

Here’s a Fay Ward outfit for sale from Nashville vintage maven Katy K. She dates it to the 40s.

I’ll never sell my Fay Ward! It is true Westernwear, a gift from a guy in a cowboy hat.

Range reading and solving the debt crisis in NYC

I always have good luck at Mercer St. Books, just south of Bleeker in Manhattan.

When I talk about used book shopping in New York, people say oh, have you been to The Strand? I haven’t! At Mercer St I generally go about ten feet to the LPs and music section before I have more than I can carry back with me, so why do I need 18 miles of books at The Strand ?

Last time, I got all I could carry in one volume, twenty pounds  or so of Tony Russell’s exhaustive early country discography.

The LP section is compact, with a little country section where this time I got The Best of  Ferlin Husky. Ferlin wasn’t big into westernwear, but check out that wool jacket on the back cover.

In the music section, I found these two great books:

O’Neal and Goodwin’s The Sons of the Pioneers is the sort of book only true fans can produce, full of interviews, documents, and photos. Many of the pictures, like this one, are from the The Pioneers’ numerous films.

clockwise from top: Bob Nolan, Karl Farr, Lloyd Perryman, Tim Spencer, Hugh Farr, Pat Brady

With the exception of Roy Rogers, The Sons of the Pioneers wore westernwear that was somewhat subdued compared to later standards set in the early fifties by Nashville singers like Lefty Frizzell.

After becoming a Nudie customer, Lefty favoured fancy fringe and rhinestones. In I Love You A Thousand Ways: The Lefty Frizzell Story, his brother David says, “Nudie made Lefty a white suit with “L” and “F” in blue rhinestones, and that was the first time rhinestones were used on a country star’s clothing.”

I wasn’t sure about that, so I checked the Nudie book. Here’s Nudie’s wife Bobbie with Lefty in the suit.

Nudie is quoted on Lefty being “the first” in Holly George-Warren and Michelle Freedman’s How The West Was Worn.

“I got to thinking Lefty would sure look terrific in rhinestones…I decided to surprise him by making up a shirt with some sparklers….but when I showed the suit to Lefty, you would have thought I was asking him to go on stage in a g-string…..He said he was afraid to look like a sissy”

Lefty quickly got over his sissy hangup and Nudie made him outfits that were increasingly ornate. There are many pictures in I Love You A Thousand Ways of Lefty in fancy fringe shirts I hadn’t seen before, and this, his first stage outfit David says was made in Dallas, Texas.

I was very pleased with my finds and the price is always reasonable. In addition, I got to hear the true solution to the weekend’s hot topic, the debt crisis and looming credit downgrade from Wayne, Mercer St proprietor.

And the answer is: closing libraries will not save four trillion dollars. Nor will it affect the used book trade. I say, free wireless for all will save libraries from becoming the computer access providers they are turning into.

Roy and Dale and Stompin’ Tom at K-W Books

I was at K-W Books in Kitchener the other day.

And there’s Roy and Dale.

I’ve seen these shirts before but never so well. They are distinctly Nathan Turk. I’ll check up on this later, but I believe his wife was the embroiderer. Her style is unmistakable.

I didn’t have a lot of time to look around, but I got a 1927 biography of Annie Oakley, and Stompin’ Tom Connor’s 1996 first hand accounting, Before The Fame.

range reading

My Uncle Rick just showed me this book he had back in 1972.

I’ve never seen him knit or ride a horse, but he had a kind of outlaw approach to publishing that took him from Nova Scotia to the open range of New York City.  The New Yorker lassoed quite a few of his stories for their corral, and now he is editor of the online literary journal anderbo.com.

New York cowboys can mosey on down to KGB Bar on February 24 to hear anderbo.com writers read from their work around the campfire.

7 to 9 pm

85 E. 4th St between the Bowery and 2nd Ave

(OK, there’s no campfire in the bar. Go anyway)