Riders in the Sky at the Ozark Folk Center

Shortly before their 6,865th concert — at the Ozark Folk Center — Ranger Doug and Too Slim sat down with State of the Ozarks to talk cowboy music, Pixar, inaugural performances, and more.

And I can’t think of a better way to kick off our new section of recorded interviews than with two-time Grammy award winners, Riders in the Sky.

— Joshua Heston

Your tagline is Bringing Beef to Hungry People. How did that come about?

Too Slim: “That’s what we do. I was watching the movie Red River with the great John Wayne and there was a part in it when he was getting ready to take the cattle to Abilene and draws his brand in the sand there by Red River for Montgomery Clift and says, ‘This is where the ranch is gonna be. This is where the house is gonna be. The cattle’s gonna be here. There’s gonna be a lot of people, lot more people coming, good people, strong people and they’re gonna need good beef. Good beef for hungry people.’

“I said, ‘Woah! That's a great line!’ Good beef for hungry people. That’s it.

“Because we’re a meaty band. We don’t just do one thing. We entertain. It’s a meaty meal, wouldn’t you say, Ranger Doug?’

Ranger Doug: Five courses.

Too Slim: “We involve all the senses.”

Ranger Doug: “Especially smell.”

On your first public performance, did you have a vision of what was to come?

Ranger Doug: “No, I don’t think there was a vision. I think it was just a love of this music that we heard and nobody was doing anymore and it was just a sense of fun. The first few shows were just fun. Once we started to get a good response was when we started to say, “You know, we could take this someplace.’ But at the very first, I’d say it was just a joy to play that music and to work with each other.”

What is the power of cowboy music?

Ranger Doug: “Well, I think it evokes nostalgia but I think the music itself is really appealing in its rhytmm and its harmony and everyone enjoys seeing a virtuoso musician and we have several in this group. People who are committed to a style that is very much the fabric of Americana and has the same appeal that bluegrass may have or Cajun music. It evokes a time and a place and yet it is contemporary in that we are here and now and we are entertaining and having fun.”

Too Slim: “It crosses all age boundaries. We get little kids right up through really old people (who remember it when it was populat in the ’30s and ’40s) and it’s something that everybody [enjoys]. There aren’t many showbiz acts that can do that: make everybody feel good in some way.”

Ranger Doug: “The older generation, as Slim said, their parents sang them these songs, some of them were alive in that era. The middle generation: they like to laugh, they like to get away from the overdue mortgage and the surly teenager, and kids — for a period of their lives until they discover rap — love cowboy music. They love the feel of the rhythm, the outfits, they can relate to songs that tell a story or paint a picture of singing with your friends and being out on a horseback. They don't know about broken hearts and cheating wives and falling off of bar stools. They can relate to the wide open spaces.”

Too Slim: “The fun and adventure of it and the feel, the loping feel of a lot of music. It’s music you sway or dance to. Kids love to dance to it.”

Ranger Doug: “It’s very happy music in a way [but] as you get older you begin to listen more closely to the lyrics and how difficult the harmony is and how pretty it is to put together. And then there’s the whole other aspect of the poetic side.”

Your music was featured in Toy Story 2. Did the offer from Pixar come as a surprise or were you expecting?

Too Slim: “It was out of the blue.”

Ranger Doug: “Complete surprise.”

Too Slim: “We had a fan at Pixar. Guy named Ash Brannon. He had a nametag, you see. They had a meeting about who would sing Woody's Roundup theme song for the show and he said, ‘I got the guys,’ so they went to our website and downloaded some yodeling and gave us a call.

Ranger Doug: We had to think it over for quite a long time. About an eighth of a second.”

Too Slim: “So that began an association with Pixar that has lasted until this day.”

Did you travel to California to record?

Too Slim: “We did. We went out and recorded the song. We had a conference with Randy Newman who wrote the song, a telephone conference, and he basically said “I’ve listened to your records. You guys know what you are doing. Just go ahead, just arrange it how you’d do it.”

And then we went out and played it and everybody said, “Great! That’s it. Disney’s sort of famous for hands-on and a lot of notes but there were none. It was “Go, do what you do.” And Pixar is a fabulous company.”

Ranger Doug: “We did a couple more things. We did the music to the For the Birds short and they mentioned us on the Oscars. That was pretty cool. And we did a little tiny piece in Cars.”

Too Slim: “We did a Monsters Inc album and that was the second Grammy.”

Ranger Doug: “I dare say, in the history of the recording industry, it is the only album strictly about monsters by a strictly Western band.”

Too Slim: “Yeah, I think that’s pretty safe [to say].”

Ranger Doug: “I certainly can’t think of another one. Sons of the Pioneers... no.”

Too Slim: “No, they got as far as the South Seas. Couldn’t get them on monsters.”

— Interview continued above right...

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