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After Wildfire, a Cowboy Band Fights to Keep a Heritage Alive
By Jack Healy
New York Times
July 6, 2012

COLORADO SPRINGS — This could be a verse out of some sad old cowboy song. It is a story of tradition and loss, of four fiddling, yodeling lifelong cowboy musicians, and how they lost nearly everything when a fire raged down from the mountains.

The men are the singing Wranglers of the Flying W Ranch, the latest incarnation of a group that has sung Western songs for generations of tourists here at the doorstep of the Rocky Mountains. They are a local institution, one whose Roy Rogers spirit endured long after odes to the open range and lonely sunsets faded from popularity. Each summer night for 54 years, the Wranglers put on their plaid shirts, took to the ranch's open-air stage, and played.

"These are the songs the cowboy sang out on the range," said Wayne Humphrey, 40, the group's bass player. "That's what we stand for."

But a wildfire can destroy a life's labor in minutes. And here in the worst-hit corner of the West's brutal fire season, where wildfires gutted nearly 350 homes and left two people dead, a racing blaze made quick work of the Flying W Ranch, and of the musical tradition the four singing cowboys had helped sustain.

On June 26, hot winds whipped a wildfire north of Colorado Springs into an inferno, doubling its size and sending it sprinting toward the subdivisions and businesses in the foothills. The Flying W was square in its path. A last team of employees and neighbors raced to ferry the ranch's 40 head of cattle to safety, and joined an exodus of residents fleeing the blizzard of ash and smoke.

The four Wranglers had been in downtown Colorado Springs, recording a 1948 song about red-eyed cattle thundering through the sky, when they got the call telling them that the ranch, and their livelihood, were gone.

"It was all gone," said Tony Ludiker, 50, the group's fiddle player. "It was incomprehensible."

Two of the Wranglers — the bandleader, David Bradley, 55, and the guitarist, Zach Lawson, 22 — also lost the ranch-owned homes where they had been living. Not even a fork was left in the heap of ash, Mr. Bradley said.

Nearly every building on the 60-year-old ranch burned to cinders. The stages where four dozen members of the Wranglers had performed over the years. The picnic tables where audiences scraped beans and barbecue from tin plates. The ranch's mock Western village, and the painstakingly recreated theater where the band performed on winter weekends.

The destruction cut deep. The band had played "Orange Blossom Special" and "Take Me Back to Tulsa" in the wrecked auditoriums, the same stages where, as children, some of them had watched their musical idols play the same songs. Mr. Humphrey is the nephew of one of the group's founding members.

"The entire place is like a family," said Aaron Winter, the ranch's sales manager.

But the loss of work and the uncertainty about the future of the Flying W Ranch are starting to tug at the group's ties.

As firefighters and some sorely needed rains help stamp out the last uncontrolled acres of the wildfire, the Wranglers are confronting the same question as thousands of people left homeless by dozens of blazes across the West: What do we do now?

The Wranglers say they need work, and soon, and they have discussed whether they can still hold together as a group. They have only six shows booked this month, including a parade performance and two corporate jobs. In the summers at the ranch, they would perform seven shows a week, sometimes two or three a day. Tourists. Family reunions. Weddings. Corporate retreats.

"It's up to us to find them now," Mr. Bradley said. "It's been tough, and every day we sit around, it keeps getting tougher."

As the ranch's owners decide their next steps, the Wranglers say they are starting to worry. They are typically paid by the show, and they no longer have any dance cards to turn in. Mr. Ludiker recently had a cancerous kidney removed, and he said he worried about the cost of follow-up treatments if his health insurance lapsed.

"I don't want to leave this group," Mr. Ludiker said. "I want us to continue. We've got to figure out how to get steady work."

It has not come easy so far. Though the Wranglers describe themselves as the second-oldest cowboy band in the country, Mr. Bradley said their reputation alone would not bring bookings. Western shows are often scheduled months in advance, he said, and he is only just beginning to reach out to event organizers and bookers, sending out the group's promotional packages. The members of the Wranglers have more than 130 years of musical experience among them, he said, and they always hit the stage "guns a-blazing."

"We do weddings, we do birthday parties," he said. "Anybody who wants to hire a cowboy band."

~ Becky in Tucson