PHOENIX, AZ, USA - Songs of the trail. Riders in the sky. Yippi I Yo ä these trinkets of Americana are experiencing a kind of cultural renaissance in Arizona, especially in, of all places, the open-mic coffeehouses once thought to be reservations for bohemian wannabes in berets.

No more. Witness Ron Privett who, like a slew of other people each night at Mama Java's , a family friendly coffeehouse along the rather eccentric boulevard otherwise known as Indian School Road in the heart of Phoenix, is at the heart of this movement. On any given day, you can find him there ready to back someone up with a fiddle, fill in with a set when somebody is missing in action or armed with an ersatz tool kit, fully prepared to lend his, well, instinctive sensibilities to problems auto face in this broken down city of gasoline dreams.

On this day, the 53-year-old Privett, in his black cowboy hat and boots, is beaming about a new CD he helped to record with his father, an item that will be ready for public purchase sometime in the future. As he talks, we listen, riding his horse down the Arizona trail.

G21: WHAT ARE YOU MoST EXCITED ABOUT YOUR CAREER RIGHT NOW?

PRIVETT: This is what I am excited about. This is my dad [passing a newly burned CD across the table by Gene Privett, a cowboy troubabour.] When I went to meet and play with Roy Rogers, here in Phoenix, -- our band happened to play with him when he came to town -- what was stunning was his face and my father's were dead ringers. The color, the skin, dead on. The same face.

I had never seen that, because growing up in Chinle, Arizona, we didn't have color TV. We only had black and white. I mentioned that to Roy and he said, "Oh yeah, that was the first thing that attracted me to your father."

G21: SO YOU GREW UP IN CHINLE, ON THE NAVAJO RESERVATION?

PRIVETT: Yeah, both my parents graduated together, and we came out here with another family, Roland Kimbrough. He was on the football team with m y dad, who wanted to be a rodeo cowboy. They were breaking horses right across the street, literally, when they told him [my Dad] he had a football scholarship. So he put that aside, and we came out with his degree. He coached football and taught English. Mom taught the classics (the 3 Rs).

G21: WHEN WAS THIS?

PRIVETT: Oh jeez, I'm 53. I was born in '51 and we came out here in 1958. It was, unfortunately, the day after they did the big nuclear blast, and so we were all exposed to radioactivity on the reservation. It was the big one; when we had to show Khrushchev we had the big one. That was the biggest one they had had ever set off in the United States, in Nevada. People all across the Navajo reservation and into Utah and parts of Nevada have been coming down with multiple myloma, a rare bone cancer. When we found that out, we contacted my brother, and he contacted the government, and they sent us a stipend.

G21: HOW MUCH DID HE GET?

PRIVETT: I think it was $50,000. This was two years ago. When you are talking about bone marrow transplants ... that's not much. He [John Privett, writer] said he was just like a soldier. That it was necessary. They had to show the Russians at that time to get them to back down. If we hadn't shown it, maybe a lot of people, a lot of soldiers, might have died. So he took it philosophically. He was at that age, four years old, where he had been playing in the dirt.

We came down to Phoenix about four years later. He [my dad] came down here, taught football and English, then he became head golf coach at Coronado High School.

I became a musician when Nixon was in the White House. I had investigated all of the things I loved, and fiddling was one of them. That was the one that took root, and I have been doing it ever since. I was 22 -- kind of late [to start] for a musician -- but if you find something you really love, and you pursue it, you can make it happen ... to some degree. I have never regretted being a fiddler.

That is always a blast. That's where the weight of the world comes off my shoulders.

G21: TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FATHER'S MUSIC CAREER.

PRIVETT: This is his first CD. When I got him a few jobs as a musician, so the musicians knew him as Ron Privett's father. Shortly thereafter, and ever since, I'm known as Gene Privett's son.

The Marriotts loved him and loved him. We played at the Camelback Inn and have been playing there ever since. He's the best around the campfire you could ever find. I am good with it because I have studied at the foot of the master.

The Marriotts have sent him to Cairo, Egypt, to their King's Palace Resort. The State of Arizona has hired him and flown him up to Monument Valley when John Wayne's family got together for a memorial get-together.

Still going strong after playing at all of the local resorts, but he never did a CD, so I am really tickled about this now. He just turned 76 and, as you might imagine, old Coach, the golf coach, is real healthy.

G21: TELL ME ABOUT BEING A MUSICIAN, YOUR MUSIC CAREER.

PRIVETT: To make a long story short: Played in a country and bluegrass band. There was a kind of, uh, roots movements at the time. People were looking for something a little different. Bluegrass was catching on. It's like blues, a real music. It started here in American in 1945 with Bill Monroe. It was on the trail of the high lonesome sound. Jerry Garcia was doing the same thing at the time with his band.

I played here, then went out to San Francisco, not even knowing at the time that Jerry Garcia had got things going on out there. It was 1976 when I got a call from a band out there that said they needed a fiddle player.

It took me a while to get my money together. I got out there and just went all up and down the coast and discovered the California scene. When I got to San Francisco, the band thing was not really happening, so I went out and became a street musician. That was a learning experience, to entertain and be around fabulous musicians.

Shortly thereafter, though, I determined that I couldn't hear myself think. Too many things going on out there. I had been raised in a much quieter scene. So I heard there was a job in Austin and I headed back. On the way back, I picked up a hitchhiker, who said he was coming from Monterrey. This guy gave me his name and it sounded vaguely familiar. But it wasn't until many years later that I knew the name and who John Hammond was. He had a steel guitar, a Dobro Steel National, and a mandolin that was the best one I'd ever played. He let me play that.

We moved on to Tucson, and he surprised me with how well he could sing. And then we moved on to Austin. We went around, auditioned a few places, and we were disappointed with how low the money was. The last day together, he decided to go to New Orleans, and I said, Nah, I'm going to head back. There is no money in Austin.

The bass player for The Fabulous Thunderbirds said, when I asked if there was any money to be made in Austin, he said, "Yes, when Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker play, and they make all of it."

So I came back, saw my relatives in Texas and Southwest Oklahoma. I had never planned to stay here [Phoenix], since by now I'd seen the world, and this looked like a gray-looking area by comparison. But then, what happened was, you meet a girl and then you stay.

Got into a band that became popular, with Jeff David -- The David/Privett Band. We were doing pretty good in the clubs, but by then I'd found another girl, and I wanted to get married. I hit that age. I was about 30 then; something kicks in. So I made a bad choice, got married for about a year and a half, then got divorced. I had a wife like Will Rogers; she never met a man she didn't like.

G21: THAT MUST HAVE BEEN VERY PAINFUL

PRIVETT: Absolutely. Everybody's first is very painful.

Then I married a woman who was a good woman. We raised our kids, and 20 years later, we divorced. But we got the kids raised, and I'm real proud of them.

I decided I wouldn't stay out to the bars until one in the morning, and started working for the resorts. That way, you get off no later than 10 o'clock, and there's no drinking, there's no carousing. It is the right kind of job for musicians. We never see any smoke but campfire smoke. I did that for 20 years.

This summer found me finding the open mic and realizing history is being made. My friend Pete Roland teaches a class, The History of Country Music, at ASU. He has to go out of town ... and he has asked me a couple of times to teach his class.

Something always happens at an event that has long-lasting implications. You don't know it at the time, but if you keep your eyes open ... and I think I'm seeing something. I think it was Voltaire who said "Every tyranny has its own underpinning."

People are tired of hearing ... well, they are just not getting what they need on the radio. A tightened playlist. The last new form of music was disco, and this was a country that created a new form of music every five or six years: rock'n'roll, jazz, bluegrass, blues, Nashville country, rap, although it has more in common with poetry than music. We have continued to produce different types of music and I don't doubt that we will continue to produce new kinds, but radio doesn't play it.

People are looking for something different at the open mic events because you can find, every night of the week, 'cept Friday and Saturday, you can find more than once a room full of people (like you do with your own Bards of Mythville). If I had been doing this 20 years ago, they would have been shouting on down to hear whatever the hit of the day was. It is different now. There is good talent here. I don't know if it is going on nationwide, but I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't.

---

Douglas
McDaniel

DOUGLAS MC DANIEL is publisher of Mythville.com and his blogger site, Mythville.blogspot.com, as well as about 10 books (although at times he loses count, since he always intends to make more). A Phoenix-based freelance writer, he can be e-mailed at mythville@yahoo.com for as long as the empire supplies electricity.