Cowboy Song

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a real trail song, and if you are a Zoo Freak you already know the feeling. Thin Lizzy's "Cowboy Song," off the 1976 album Jailbreak, rides in soft and then kicks the gate open. You can hear it right now on THE ZOO, the listener-supported rock station that still treats an album cut like it matters. Phil Lynott and drummer Brian Downey wrote this one together, and it started life under a plainer name, "Derby Blues." An early live take still carrying that title turned up later on the expanded edition of Jailbreak. By the time they cut the record, the better title had stuck, and it fit the picture Lynott had been painting since the band's very first single, "The Farmer." He had a long fascination with the old West, and this was the song where he finally put a saddle on it.

The track opens like a campfire. Acoustic guitar, a little harmonica hiding in the wind, a coyote call, and Lynott almost talking to himself: just a cowboy, lonesome on the trail, thinking about a certain female. Then the drums rise, Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson lock into one of those twin-guitar lines that only this band could draw, and the whole thing turns into a hard-rock gallop. Album length runs about five minutes and sixteen seconds. The single, sent out in the States and Canada in September 1976 with "Angel from the Coast" on the flip, was trimmed to a little over three minutes and stalled at number 77. It never got the radio push of "The Boys Are Back in Town" or the title track, but the Zoo Freaks in the room will tell you it became the one they waited for. Mark Putterford, who wrote Phil Lynott: The Rocker, heard the singer in it as a cross between Clint Eastwood and Rudolph Valentino, with a bit of George Best thrown in. Rolling Stone later called the song definitive. AllMusic said it turns the commonplace into legend. That is a fair way to hear a Dublin man writing about rodeos, buffalo, and a town down in Mexico.

The Texas verse is the one that sticks with a lot of listeners out this way. "I was took in Texas, I did not know her name." Lynott had just come off an American tour, and he loved Texas. He was not a ranch hand. He was a touring rock singer who had grown up on the idea of the outlaw, the traveler, the man who keeps moving. The cowboy in the lyric busts broncs for the rodeo, rolls over, gets spun around, and rides on. Some of that is pure picture-book West. Some of it is the dizzy life of a band that, in early 1976, was recording what might have been its last chance. Jailbreak was the third album on the label deal, cut with producer John Alcock, and the classic four were in the room: Lynott on bass, vocals, and acoustic guitar, Gorham and Robertson on the leads, Downey on the drums. Manager Chris O'Donnell later said that if the record had not sold, the band might have been dropped. It sold. "The Boys Are Back in Town" had nearly been left off the album under the working title "G.I. Joe," until O'Donnell heard the pile of demos and insisted. "Cowboy Song" did not need that kind of rescue. It already had the dust on it.

How Phil Lynott got to that microphone is a longer ride. He was born Philip Parris Lynott on August 20, 1949, in West Bromwich, England, to Philomena Lynott, a young Dubliner training as a nurse, and Cecil Parris. The parents parted before he was born. Philomena sent him to Dublin to be raised by his grandparents in Crumlin, and that is the city that shaped him. He went through the Christian Brothers' school and a spell at technical college, tried an apprenticeship as a fitter at a foundry, hated it, and quit with his mother's blessing. Music had already taken hold. He idolized Elvis Presley and, a little later, Jimi Hendrix. As a teenager he sang with a local group called the Black Eagles alongside Brian Downey, a school pal who would stay with him for the long haul. They mixed rock and roll with the odd country ballad, because that was what the halls would stand for.

After the Black Eagles broke up, Lynott sang with a few other outfits and then landed in Skid Row, one of the sharper bands in Dublin, led by bassist Brush Shiels. Lynott was tall, thin, and striking, a natural front man, but the rest of the band was not sold on his voice. In 1969, while he was hoarse with tonsillitis, they let him go. Shiels did him a favor on the way out. Convinced Lynott had no future as a singer, he taught him the bass. Lynott took to it, started writing, and formed a short-lived band called Orphanage with Downey on drums. Late in 1969, Belfast guitarist Eric Bell came down to the Countdown Club on Mary Street, still a little buzzed, and sat in on the idea of a new group. Downey was not sure. Lynott was. They split Orphanage and started Thin Lizzy around the turn of 1970, with Lynott on bass and lead vocals and most of the songs.

The name came from a comic. Bell, who had been reading the Beano, floated Tin Lizzie, the old Ford in the cartoon. Say "thin" in a Dublin accent and you are most of the way to Thin Lizzy. They cut a single called "The Farmer" that barely sold, then signed to Decca, moved toward London, and released a self-titled debut in 1971. The breakthrough was the 1973 remake of the old folk song "Whiskey in the Jar." Bell left soon after. Gary Moore passed through. The lineup that cut Jailbreak arrived when two young gunslingers joined: Scottish guitarist Brian Robertson and California guitarist Scott Gorham, who has told the story of auditioning in a West Hampstead restaurant and briefly mistaking Lynott for a waiter. Gorham has also said that when Lynott brought an idea, it often arrived as a bass line, and the guitarists had to build the room around it. That is the chemistry you hear when "Cowboy Song" leaves the prairie and hits the highway.

Lynott kept writing like a man who had read the paperbacks and lived the road. By Jailbreak he had the poet's ear and the rocker's grin in the same verse. The band would go on through lineup changes, more albums, and nights that got harder than the songs, and Lynott died in 1986 at 36. The record did not fade. "Cowboy Song" stayed in the live set, turned up in films years later, and even lent its name to an authorized biography. Anthrax, Golden Smog, and plenty of bar bands have taken a crack at it. None of them replace the original, with Downey pushing the drums and those two guitars answering each other like riders on either side of the trail.

If you want the band's own shelf, the official home is Thin Lizzy Official, where the discography still lists Jailbreak and the later deluxe edition of that same album. The verified page on Facebook is the place they post news and old photographs. Their Instagram carries the same camp, including notes on the early days and the name. On X they are @ThinLizzy_, still pointing folks toward the catalog and the shop. For the fans who keep the fire lit between releases, the public group THIN LIZZY FAMILY is a busy room, thousands of members trading stories, set lists, and the odd argument about which guitar solo wins. Roll it over, Zoo Freaks. The cowboy is still on the trail, and the song still sounds like dust and twin leads.