The peripatetic family changed zip codes almost as often as they changed diapers, as Bud’s postings took them from New England to Virginia to California, and back again.
“One of my first memories is when I’m three or four years old, my dad bringing me into a beer joint and just popping me in front of the Wurlitzer jukebox,” Billy Cowsill once told me. “All he had to do was keep the quarters coming.”
Unfortunately, Bud Cowsill came from a troubled family. “He was a real good guy, a guy who would give you the shirt off his back,” Billy Cowsill said. “But if he’d got a gut full of liquor, he’d beat your head into the wall.”
Retiring from the navy in 1963, Bud Cowsill settled his large brood at Newport, RI. A hustler by nature, and struggling on an inadequate pension, the family was so poor they chopped up furniture for the fireplace after being cut off from heating oil. They also neglected to shovel the driveway in an attempt to discourage bill collectors. When his sons formed a band, Bud Cowsill eagerly followed a neighbour’s suggestion of putting the children on stage.
Led by Billy, the Cowsill boys had put together a quartet, a reflection of the family’s insular nature after years on the road. None had formal musical training. With Billy on guitar, Bob on guitar and organ, Barry on bass, and John on drums, the young quartet played church socials, school sock hops and weddings.
At one gig they were spotted by a holidaying writer for The Today Show and they soon made their network television debut. After that, success was assured for “America’s First Family of Music,” whose lineup often included the boys’ mother, Barbara, and sister Susan. The band’s hit singles included The Rain, The Park, and Other Things (1967), Indian Lake (1968) and Hair (1969), the title song of the rock musical. Five other singles also reached the charts in those years, a stunning reversal of fortune for the family.
They lost it almost as suddenly. Bud Cowsill, who was the group’s business manager, filed for bankruptcy in 1975, owing about $450,000 to creditors.
Billy Cowsill had long since left the band. He had an explosive argument with his father in Las Vegas and was fired the next day.
A Cowsill by name but no longer by profession, he recorded a solo album that sank without a trace and then wandered across America, playing in coffee shops and taverns. Along the way, the Beach Boys invited him on tour to replace Brian Wilson, who had suffered a nervous breakdown. Cowsill decided to seek out his hero before taking the gig. By then, the corpulent Beach Boy had retired into a world of his own making that included a sandbox in his living room.
“Oh, Billy, don’t do it,” Wilson warned. “It’ll drive you crazy. It’ll get you nuts.”
Cowsill followed his idol’s advice. “I looked at him and thought . . . obviously this guy knows what he’s talking about.”
Instead, he used the last of his Cowsills money to buy a bar in Austin, Texas. As might be predicted, he and his coterie drank the joint dry. Cowsill headed north, stopping in the Northwest Territories, where he found work driving trucks from Hay River over the frozen Great Slave Lake to Yellowknife.
By 1979, he had landed in Vancouver, where he fronted Blue Northern, producing a four-song extended-play record in 1980 and an album the following year.
He continued to drink heavily until the birth of a son inspired him to stop. It was a short-lived abstinence. He would later joke he had considered writing a song titled, “How Can I Look up to Daddy When He’s Passed Out on the Floor?”
One of the highlights of his live performances was a Dead Man’s Set, in which Cowsill and his band would play only tunes by deceased rock stars.
Larry Wanagas, who was singer k.d. lang’s manager, brought Cowsill into his stable, but was unable to get him aligned with a record label. “No one would sign me because my name was Cowsill,” he once complained. “For three years, if I was a space heater, [Wanagas] couldn’t have sold me to the Eskimos.”
Cowsill was about to move to Nashville when he hooked up with Jeffrey Hatcher, a prolific tunesmith with whom he formed The Blue Shadows. The rocking country outfit called their ringing harmonies “Hank Williams goes to the Cavern Club.” Their 1993 debut album, On the Floor of Heaven, won a Juno nomination for country group of the year. They followed with a second album, Lucky To Me, which also won critical acclaim, but once again proved too country for rock radio and too rock for country radio. The group dissolved in 1996.
Cowsill suffered from a serious back problem, an injury whose pain he tried to mask with ever more serious bouts of drinking and pill popping. Friends brought him to Calgary, where he once again went on the wagon and underwent back surgery. Despite a deteriorating physical condition, Cowsill continued to perform, even taking to the stage despite needing a cane following hip-replacement surgery.
His death, while sudden, was not entirely unexpected. Cowsill was known to suffer from emphysema, osteoporosis and Cushing’s syndrome, a hormonal imbalance. The news reached his surviving siblings as they gathered in Rhode Island to mark the death of brother Barry Cowsill in New Orleans. He had gone missing in Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, and his body was not identified until the following January. A day after their older brother’s death, the surviving Cowsills recreated their sunny sound at a memorial service.
February 28, 2006
Billy Cowsill enjoys a smoke outside Calgary’s Mecca Cafe in 2002. He hit the pop charts with three Top 10 tunes as lead singer of the Cowsills, the family act that was the model for television’s Partridge Family. PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE CALGARY HERALD ARCHIVES
Alberta Slim
Yodeling Cowboy Singer
(February 2, 1910—November 25, 2005)
Pearl Edwards
Pearl the Elephant Girl
(October 7, 1922—March 18, 2006)
Best known as the singer Alberta Slim, Eric Edwards was an English-born yodeling cowboy who rode the rails of Western Canada during the Depression, stopping along the way to coax coins for his supper from passersby by singing hobo songs on street corners.
After he built a career as a western singer on radio in Saskatchewan, he returned to touring the country, both as a singer and with his own travelling circus. On one such barnstorming journey through the Maritimes, he was inspired by a fragrant springtime phenomenon to write When It’s Apple Blossom Time in the Annapolis Valley.
That song would become his signature. Edwards’s verse was simple in construction and heartfelt in delivery. He performed until 2003 when, at ninety-three, a variety of infirmities at last made it impossible for him to follow the open road.
An irrepressible performer, Edwards had a predilection for cowboy shirts and white stetsons. He never willingly surrendered a microphone. He was, by his own admission, a yodeling fool, as likely to launch into an extended call in the middle of conversation as he was to do in song. “That yodeling don’t go with it,” he said with a whoop on one such occasion. “I just did it for the hell of it.”
Eric Charles Edwards was born at Wilsford, Wiltshire, a village near Salisbury Plain in England. His father, who drove a taxi and ran a pool hall, moved the family to nearby Upavon after returning from service in the Great War. While working as a publican at Larkhill, the descriptions of Canada by homesick Canadian soldiers billeted in the area persuaded him to immigrate to a land he had never seen.
The Edwards family purchased three quarter-sections of ranchland near the Saskatchewan side of Lloydminster in 1920. A move to St. Walburg came two years later. Music provided entertainment at home, as father fiddled and mother played an organ, while the four boys and three girls joined in on banjo and guitar.
The cowboy crooner left home as a young man with a guitar and $25 raised from selling