For folk singer Skip Gorman, the music of the American cowboy and the old West extends well beyond the familiar strains heard in Hollywood Westerns. Clad in a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, spurs, and chaps, he performs songs that evoke campfires, cattle drives, the isolation of the open prairies, and the distinctive characters of frontier days.
Over more than twenty-five years, Gorman has refined his distinctive musical style. The recordings of “Yodeling Brakeman” Jimmie Rodgers prompted him to pick up the guitar at age eight. By seventeen he had reached comparable proficiency on fiddle and mandolin, trading licks with Bill Monroe at a Virginia bluegrass festival. While pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Utah in the mid-1970s, he started amassing 78 rpm discs by early cowboy vocalists.
Traditional Celtic music exerted a strong pull as well; Gorman traveled to Donegal to study Irish fiddling under Johnny Doherty and to Scotland to work with Aly Bain of the Boys of the Lough.
His first appearance on disc came with the 1972 multi-artist collection Old Time Fiddling, taped at the Northeast Fiddling Competition. Two years later, as a member of the Desert String Band, he contributed to the album Land of Milk & Honey. Beyond four solo projects, he has since collaborated on recordings with Ron Kane, Rabbit in a Log, and the New Hampshire Fiddlers Union.
Although Gorman resides primarily on his ten-acre New Hampshire ranch, he returns each summer to the High Island Ranch in Hamilton Dome, Wyoming, where he works as a cowboy and leads songs. His composition “Cowboy Waltz” appeared in Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball, and the tune “Buffalo Hump” was featured in Burns’ Lewis and Clark.
