“Fred and Red go to the cattle roundup.”
This sounds like the setup for a joke, but it happened, and in many ways is still happening. At the heart of this story is a 50-year friendship between the Cowboy Artists of America and one of its most loyal supporters.
The characters in this true story are Fred Fellows, artist and emeritus member of the Cowboy Artists of America, and Red Steagall, the musician, actor and poet. Both men live and breathe the West, and in 1970 they met through a mutual friend in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. “When I met him, we became instant friends,” Steagall says of Fellows from his home in Texas.
Red Steagall, right, with Bill Owen in 1984. Courtesy Wayne Baize.
Fellows recalls a fishing excursion during the trip. “Red loved to fish so we rode horses up to this little lake so he could fish. There were no fish in that lake, but I figured Red would like to fish anyway. We tied the horses up and I could see how excited he was. He tossed his lure out into the water and reeled it in. Wouldn’t you know it, he caught a fish. From the lake with no fish.”
At that time in 1970, Fellows had only been a member of the CA for a year, and the organization itself was only five years old. After they parted ways in Montana, Steagall and Fellows vowed to keep in touch. They reconnected in 1973 when Steagall was playing at a county fair. During that meet-up, Fellows invited the musician to attend an art show in St. Louis, where Steagall met Bill Owen and Joe Beeler. The next year, he attended the annual trail ride at the HF Bar Ranch in Saddlestring, Wyoming. “That was the start of it all,” Steagall says of his relationship with the CA. “That was where they became my family.”
Red Steagall at a recent performance.
He continues: “I had an unbelievable time. It was during that first trail ride, that I was standing out in this meadow drinking a bottle of wild turkey whiskey. Joe Beeler was there, and Fred and Bill Owen. As we were making our way back to camp I found this elk jawbone in the meadow. Fred told me to take it back and put it under my bed because it would bring me good luck. The next morning, I woke up and there, laying on top of my bed, was the jawbone and all the artists had drawn pictures on it. I still have it here on my wall. It’s one of my most treasured possessions.”
Bruce Greene, Old Friends and Fine Horses, 2017, oil on canvas
The mid-1970s was a formative era for the CA as it stretched its legs and grew beyond its founders, two of whom had died by that time—George Phippen in 1966 and Charlie Dye in 1973. It was also an important period for Steagall, who was writing music, producing records and hit songs, and interacting with some of the biggest artists of the 20th century, including Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. He also started touring around that time and appeared on Hee Haw. In 1974, he discovered a young Reba McEntire after she sang the national anthem during a rodeo in Oklahoma City. When he wasn’t with musicians, he was with cowboys or artists.
“Those were great years, for sure,” Steagall says. “I was around people like John Clymer, Jim Boren, Melvin Warren. Gosh, I could go on about all these artists. They were magnificent men. Everyone enjoyed Frank Polk. Once we were sitting around a campfire and Frank was there. This was in 1983. It was suggested they make me an honorary member of the CA. And Frank”—who had a famous stutter—“said, ‘H-h-h-h-hell, I th-th-thought he already was.’ Frank was my buddy.”
Tyler Crow, The Cowboy’s Troubadour, 2018, charcoal on paper.
The group, even some of its prickliest members, was impressed by Steagall’s talent, his personality and his genuineness. “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t love the guy to death. We just thought the world of him, and he was always a friend,” says Fellows, who adds that Steagall invited him and Bill Owen on a trip on his band’s tour bus, which started to run out of gas on the highway. The bus puttered to a gas station but stopped just short of the pumps. “There we all were, Red and his band and Bill and I—everyone but the bus driver—pushing that big bus into the gas station. You always have fun when you’re with Red.”
Tom Ryan, left, Bill Owen, Red Steagall, Joel Nelson and Bill Nebeker during a trail ride in 1984.
Steagall, who has only missed three trail rides in five decades, has been with the CA through much of its history. He’s been associated with the group longer than every living member except Fellows. He sticks around because the members are his friends, but also because he believes in what they’re doing within Western culture. “Those pictures mean a lot to me. I’ve always admired the cowboy and what he stands for. It’s been something I’ve been fascinated by since I was a little bitty boy,” the singer says, adding that the CA’s members strive for authentic depictions of the West. “I wonder how many canvases they’ve cut up with a knife because it just wasn’t working. They’re very intuitive. They understand life. They understand the livestock business. They understand the landscape. They understand each other. And they are the authentic portrayers of the lifestyle that we dearly love. They hold themselves to a high standard.”
In the 1990s, a number of new members joined the CA who would become important to Steagall’s life, and him to theirs. One was Bruce Greene, who was inducted into the group in 1993. The two didn’t start palling around until several years later, when Steagall and Greene connected at the JA Ranch in Clarendon in the Texas Panhandle. “Red invited me into that experience at the JA, and it completely changed my career because I started painting those guys there and seeing all this really great stuff,” Greene says. “Red said that’s when I got the dust in my nose, which meant that I wasn’t standing back watching, but actually doing it. I rode the miles, and I felt it. It allowed me to interpret art on a whole different level.”
Red Steagall, center left, playing his guitar during a CA trail ride.
Greene admits he’s called his friend on more than one occasion to ask about artwork titles, and Steagall, who was named the poet laureate of Texas in 2006, has helped him out. In 2022, the poet wrote a whole poem to accompany one of Greene’s paintings, When the Bloom is on the Beargrass:
The muffled sound of hoof beats,
except where grass is thin,
is a noisy contradiction to the silence of the men.
It’s the time of year when old hands turn to young bucks in their prime.
When the bloom is on the beargrass, saddle up. It’s brandin’ time.
Martin Grelle also first encountered Steagall in the 1990s, not long after his induction in the CA in 1995. “I had seen him years and years earlier, when he was performing as Red Steagall and the Coleman County Cowboys. I just loved his music,” Grelle says. “When I started seeing him in person regularly, especially at the CA show, which was held in Phoenix at that time, that’s when I came to know him as a brother to all of us. The trail rides were the best, though. He would sit around the campfire and sing his songs and recite his poems. It was, and still is, an incredible experience to hear Red.”
Bruce Greene, When the Bloom is on the Beargrass, oil, 40 x 40 in.
Grelle adds that Steagall has a picture-perfect memory: “I’ve traveled with Red to various places and no matter where we go, someone will recognize him. Chances are it will be some cowboy from a ranch from years earlier. No matter who it is, Red remembers them. I’ve never once seen him not know who someone was. He just genuinely cares about people.”
Steagall knew many of the early CA members, all of the middle-era artists from the 1980s and 1990s, and today he’s connecting with the group’s youngest generation, including Tyler Crow, who joined the group in 2016. The Texas painter, the youngest artist ever inducted into the CA, first met the singer as a child. He was just a fan then; today he counts Steagall as family. “We’re so lucky to have him because he is everything that the Cowboy Artists of America represents. He’s the cowboy that treats everyone with respect and is true to his word. His place in the group runs very deep,” Crow says. “He is truly loved by all of us.”
Red Steagall, left, with Tom Ryan in 1984.
Steagall, reflecting on his time with the CA, values what fine artists do because they can condense large ideas down into single images. “It’s still a romantic kind of business, being a cowboy. You wake up in the morning and you’re circling that big pasture and watching the prairie come alive and listening to the day sounds take over the night sounds. A lot of time you’re on a hill by yourself looking over a valley and seeing where your place is in the roundup. It’s a very spiritual thing. And that’s one reason I like it so much and it means so much to me. Because I can still feel that solitude and still feel that presence,” he says. “And these artists can capture all that in a way that sings to me. I don’t really get to ride anymore these days, but I still go to trail ride just because I want to sit with them and hear their stories and identify with what they’re seeing.” —
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