(Ghost) Riders in the Sky

The Zoo Crew has been spinning a song that rides in like a storm front over the fairway, and the Zoo Freaks on the other end of the dial already know the stampede when they hear it. "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky" by the Outlaws, off the 1980 album Ghost Riders, is the kind of record that makes a room of longhairs and bikers lean in at the same time. It is a cover, sure, but the Tampa boys did not treat it like a museum piece. They took a cowboy campfire tale, bolted three electric guitars to the saddle, and sent it galloping until the tape ran hot. If you are just tuning into THE ZOO, this is one of those deep-cut moments where the southern rock story and the old western myth shake hands.

The song itself goes back to 1948, written by Stan Jones, a Death Valley park ranger who wrote tunes on the side. Jones used to tell friends that the idea came from boyhood, when an old man near the Arizona border pointed at the clouds and said the shapes were the souls of damned cowboys, forever chasing the Devil's herd across the sky. Red eyes, steel hooves, a warning that a man who will not change his ways ends up riding with them. Jones borrowed the melody from the Civil War march "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" and turned that sky legend into a cowboy standard. By 1949 Vaughn Monroe had a version that sat at number one for eleven weeks. Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, Burl Ives, and later Johnny Cash all took a turn. The British instrumental band the Shadows even put it on the UK chart. Hundreds of versions exist. The Outlaws still managed to make theirs sound like nobody else's.

Their cut landed on Ghost Riders, the sixth studio album, released through Arista on November 22, 1980. The sessions were split among Mediasound in New York City, Bayshore Recording in Miami, and the Record Plant in Los Angeles, with Gary Lyons producing alongside Hughie Thomasson and Billy Jones. The lineup on that record was a hard-rocking Florida guitar army: Thomasson, Billy Jones, and Freddie Salem on guitars and vocals, Mike Duke on keyboards, Rick Cua on bass, and David Dix on drums. AllMusic later noted that the country lean of the earlier albums was gone and the three-guitar attack was the whole point. The album version of the title song runs about five minutes and fifty-two seconds, and the band left off the last verse of Stan Jones's original so the arrangement could stay tight and mean. Hughie's acoustic guitar, both the arpeggiated lines and the full-tilt strumming, sits under the electric leads like a trail map under a stampede. The edited single is fine. The album take is the one that feels like a live show that got loose in the studio.

The record was a comeback. The albums just before it had sold in a quieter way, and Ghost Riders pulled the band back into wider view. It climbed to number 25 on the Billboard album chart and number 12 in Canada. The single reached number 31 on the Hot 100 and number 15 on the rock tracks chart, spending fifteen weeks on the pop chart, and it hit number 15 in Canada. For a band that had lived inside southern rock rooms, that was attention from folks who did not own a single Allman Brothers record. It was also the last Outlaws album for Billy Jones, who was asked to leave after the release. Jones and bassist Frank O'Keefe would both be gone by 1995, and Hughie Thomasson, the only player who had appeared on every Outlaws album up to that point, died in 2007. Ghost Riders sits right on that ridge, a hard-rock peak with a farewell already written into the lineup.

Years later, Henry Paul and Hughie sat down with Redbeard for an In the Studio conversation marking the forty-fifth anniversary of the album. It turned out to be Hughie's last interview of that kind. The talk reached back to the early hauls, when the band rode to gigs packed into a metallic-painted, windowless van they called the Copper Coffin. Redbeard called the song a galloping production showstopper, set beside the stacked harmonies of "You Are the Show" and the long anthem "Green Grass and High Tides." The same piece has kept finding new riders. Professional wrestler Hangman Adam Page took the Outlaws version as his ring entrance, which is a long way from a Death Valley campfire and somehow still fits. A song about a man who will not change his ways, chased across the sky by a herd he cannot catch, was always going to outlive the decade that recorded it.

The band that cut it did not arrive fully formed. Down in Tampa in late 1967, Hughie Thomasson, drummer David Dix, bassist Phil Holmberg, guitarists Hobie O'Brien and Frank Guidry, and singer Herb Pino were knocking around under names like the Rogues and the Four Letter Words. Guidry brought the Outlaws name with him from an earlier group. Members left to get married, deals at Criteria Studios in Miami came and went without a released album, and the country-rock pull of Poco started to show up once Dave Graham joined the circle. The version most folks mean when they say the Outlaws came together around 1972. Henry Paul, a singer and guitarist raised in the Tampa area who had spent a couple of years gigging in Greenwich Village, came home and formed a country-rock outfit called Sienna with drummer Monte Yoho and bassist Frank O'Keefe. Hughie, back from a short spell in New York backing folksinger Milton Carroll, joined them, and Sienna became the Outlaws again. Billy Jones, who had sat in on organ, returned from Colorado in 1973, switched to guitar, and the first Florida Guitar Army was born.

They built a crowd at college hangouts like the Collage and My Back Yard, playing for University of South Florida students who wanted something earthier than the teen dance bands of the sixties. Henry Paul has said they were in the right place at the right time, with the right racket, the right look, and the right energetic performance. Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd urged Clive Davis to take a look, and the Outlaws became one of the first acts signed to Davis's new Arista label. The brief, half joke and half orders, was to sing like the Eagles and play like the Allmans. The 1975 debut delivered "There Goes Another Love Song" and the long guitar sermon "Green Grass and High Tides." Lady in Waiting and Hurry Sundown followed, gold and platinum markers of that era, and the band shared stages with the Allman Brothers, Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Charlie Daniels Band, the Doobie Brothers, the Who, the Eagles, and the Rolling Stones. Henry Paul left after the third album, later co-founding Blackhawk, and the lineup kept shifting. Hughie carried the name through the lean years, spent a stretch with Skynyrd, and put the Outlaws back together before his death. Paul took the lead again in 2008, and the band that still walks out under that name treats the old book, Ghost Riders included, as living repertoire rather than a closed chapter.

The road from a windowless van in Tampa to a hard-rock cover of a 1948 cowboy legend is a long one, and the Zoo Freaks have ridden every mile of it with the Crew. The official home for the band is Outlaws Music, where the history, the road dates, and the Florida Guitar Army story still live. The band keeps the porch light on for fans at Facebook, posts the road pictures and the new shirt designs at Instagram, and checks in on X. The longtime listeners have their own campfire too, over at the Outlaws Ghost Riders Fan Club, a group named for the very record on the turntable, where folks still trade set lists, old ticket stubs, and stories about nights when three guitars tried to outrun a ghost herd. That is the company this song keeps. Stan Jones saw riders in the clouds. The Outlaws put amplifiers under them. The Zoo Crew just keeps the needle in the groove.