Among the foremost exponents of Western music from the 1990s forward, the Sons of the San Joaquin blended pristine vocal blends with an authentic devotion to frontier lore and the vintage cowboy repertoire of the 1930s and 1940s. Joe and Jack Hannah spent their formative years in California’s Great Central Valley beneath the Sierra Nevada range, immersed in ranch life where their father regularly performed Sons of the Pioneers numbers. Those childhood surroundings later defined the trio’s artistic direction. In 1987, Joe’s son Lon—an amateur vocalist at the time—joined his father and uncle for a spontaneous set at their grandfather’s birthday gathering, thereby launching the group. An unplanned appearance at the 1989 Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada caught the ear of Michael Martin Murphey, who subsequently featured the three singers on his Cowboy Songs collection. The Sons then joined Warner Western, the label devoted to Western music and poetry, and Murphey oversaw their 1992 debut A Cowboy Has to Sing, which critics praised for its natural revival of the Pioneers’ signature harmonies and narrative style. The following year brought Songs of the Silver Screen, an album that restored soundtrack material from B-movie Westerns originally cut by the Pioneers. From Whence Came the Cowboy, issued in 1995, marked the first collection to consist primarily of original songs, most of them composed by Jack Hannah. The trio moved to Western Jubilee Recording Company for 1997’s Gospel Trails, a set of beloved hymns delivered in their characteristic three-part harmony. Horses, Cattle & Coyotes appeared in 1999, followed a year later by Sing One for the Cowboy. Early in the new decade the group issued a career-spanning retrospective, a holiday project titled For the Young, and the Young at Heart, and the 2005 album Way Out Yonder. Jack Hannah also published the illustrated children’s title The Value Mountain Trail, accompanied by its own CD. The Sons returned with A Cowboy’s Song in 2011. By 2017, with Joe and Jack past eighty and Lon in his sixties, they declared One More Ride their concluding full-length release.
