20 Years Ago: Country Music Loses Its Rodeo Hero

History 58 Comments

Chris LeDoux Memorial in Kaycee, Wyoming


We want our country and Western artists to be the real deal. Even if it doesn’t make any bit of difference in the quality of the music, we want to know that they sing what they live, and live what they sing. Somehow, it makes the music sound better. We want to believe that we’re hearing real stories straight from the heart, and performers only play music in between living out their songs.

This is especially true for the Western side of country. This is where the singing cowboys under big skies induced the poetic soul into country music’s influences from the stories and rhymes they spun around campfires when there was no other means of entertainment. Even after the West was won, the farmers and ranchers of the plains and Rockies have kept these customs alive.

That authenticity of Western music is where the appeal lay with Chris LeDoux for many years, and what allowed him to sell some six million records and perform for so many people. Chis LeDoux was a completely independent artist for the vast majority of his career, releasing scores of albums and selling out rodeo arenas until he had no other choice but sign to a major label after Garth Brooks helped blow him up bigger than he could handle in-house.

“I stole my whole act from Chris [LeDoux],” Garth Brooks once admitted, and said on another occasion, “I have two moments that I would say have been the highlights of my career: getting to play the 100th anniversary of Cheyenne’s Frontier Days with Chris LeDoux, and getting into the Grand Ole Opry.”

But Chris LeDoux didn’t rise to fame first in country music. Born in Biloxi, Mississippi, LeDoux learned how to ride horses when visiting his grandparents’ farm in Wyoming. He competed in his first rodeo when he was 13. Soon he would be winning junior rodeo championships. His family moved to Cheyenne during his high school years. LeDoux would win two Wyoming State Rodeo Championships for bareback riding, and in 1976, he won the world bareback riding championship at the National Finals Rodeo (NFR).

But this whole time, Chris LeDoux was writing and recording songs about his life. Instead of heading to Nashville though, he recorded his music in a friend’s basement, and founded his own record label called American Cowboy Songs. LeDoux sold tapes and records out of his truck on the rodeo circuit. He self-released 21 albums between 1971 and 1989 when he finally signed with Liberty Records, and later Capitol Records out of Nashville.

Chris LeDoux’s first major label release in 1991 was called Western Underground, named after his backing band, which referenced the underground nature of Chris LeDoux’s country and Western career. Before the era of independent country we enjoy today where independent artists are selling out arenas, Chris LeDoux was DIY hero who became a superstar all by himself, avoiding Music Row, and favoring the rodeo circuit where he was so beloved.

Later in his career, DeLoux became almost just as much a rock musician as a country and Western one as arenas filled to hear him perform. He was one of country music’s first arena stars, though he never had a Top 10 hit on his own, just his song “Whatcha Gonna Do with a Cowboy” featuring Garth Brooks that went #7 in 1992.

Chris LeDoux was larger than life and seemed bulletproof. But on March 9th, 2005—20 years ago today—we lost LeDoux at the young age of 56 due to bile duct Cancer. He never got to take the victory lap his career deserved. Chris LeDoux was cremated and his ashes scattered. But if you go to his final hometown in Kaycee, Wyoming, there is an incredible statue and memorial garden dedicated to him that you can visit and pay your respects.

Chris LeDoux—gone too soon. But he left behind a towering legacy in rodeo and Western music that even the Wyoming winds will never erode.

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