Don Edwards
2005 WMA Hall of Fame Member

The son of a vaudeville magician, Don Edwards was exposed as a child to a vast cross-section of music from classical to jazz, and blues to western-swing. Many of the those influences enter his own music as they did some of the music of the West. Edwards was drawn to the cowboy life by the books of Will James and B-Westerns of the silver screen, particularly those featuring "'sure-' nuff cowboys" like Tom Mix and Ken Maynard. He taught himself guitar, starting at age ten, and chased the rodeo and worked ranches in Texas and New Mexico during his teens. In 1961, he got a job as an actor/singer/stuntman at Six Flags Over Texas and he was to stick with music from then on. He made his first record in 1964. Don became part owner of the White Elephant Saloon in the Fort Worth stockyards and would play acoustic sets on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and with a band on weekends. Esquire magazine has named the White Elephant one of America's 100 best bars. Edwards also began playing throughout out Oklahoma and Texas, and with the inception of the Cowboy poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, he achieved widespread recognition. He has now entertained throughout the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Europe and the Far East. Don Edwards has two albums, Guitars & Saddle Songs and Songs of the Cowboy, included in the Folklore Archives of the Library of Congress. These anthologies have been re-recorded and expanded as the 32-song double CD/cassette called Saddle Songs on the Western Jubilee Recording Company's label. This project took first place as the Best Folk/Traditional Album of the year at the annual AFIM INDIE Awards Ceremony held in May of 1998. He has twice received the National Cowboy Hall of Fame's "Wrangler Award" for Outstanding Traditional Western Music, one for his recording, Chant of the Wanderer in 1992, and for the second time in 1996 for West of Yesterday. Other projects include a book published by the Gibbs Smith Publishing Co. entitled Classic Cowboy Songs; performing on Nanci Griffith's Grammy-winning video and recording, Other Voices, Other Rooms; co-presenter along with Waddie Mitchell on the network-televised Academy of Country Music Awards and featured performer for the "Golden Boot Awards" in Hollywood. Don has presented Western music educational programs at Yale, Rice, Texas Christian and other universities. He has been invited to appear at, and return to, the prestigious Lincoln Center in New York, because of his popularity with audiences who want to learn more about Western music and who enjoy hearing it performed by a talented cowboy who knows the music intimately. His recordings for the Warner Western label, Goin' Back to Texas, Songs of the Trail and The Bard & the Balladeer, among others, expanded the outreach of his music to larger audiences. He has since recorded a number of albums for Western Jubilee, one of which, My Hero, Gene Autry, was recorded "live" at Gene Autry's 90th birthday party. In 1997, Robert Redford asked Don to appear (and sing) in his film, The Horse Whisperer. Since then, his music has been used in 2 other feature films, Silver City and The Grizzly Man. Although the era of the singing cowboy on the silver screen supposedly ended in 1954, Don Edwards continues to carry on the tradition, on-screen and off, bringing Western music and it's history to new and enthusiastic audiences across the US and around the world. In addition to his numerous accomplishments and contributions to Western music, Bobby Weaver of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, has described Don Edwards as "...the best purveyor of cowboy music in America today."