A Message from Paul Zarzyski

​​​​​​I write this on the eve of my 75th birthday,

which, how apropos, falls on Memorial Day, 2026.

In keeping with my resolve to use this pivotal

moment as a springboard to living out my

remaining days focused on expressions of

humility and gratitude, especially regarding

longstanding Friendships with fellow artists

and collaborators—the catalysts for every

positive nuance of my creative journey—

I offer this shout-out to cowboy singer and

songwriter extraordinaire, Andy Hedges.  

Andy and I met at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, one of the foremost meccas for the genesis of thousands of enduring Friendships. At the time, he was a journeyman up-n-comer, well on his way to finding his voice and his place in the word-spurring cowboy West, while I was giving it my all to avoid becoming just one more annoying geriatric rodeo poet hanging out behind the chutes—in the wings of the main stage— and boasting to the young hands how they should have been here back when the poetry and songs really bucked. 

It was evident early on to us seasoned veterans that Andy was following the calling of those, such as the great Don Edwards, determined to sing and recite the stanzas, verses, and choruses of the tradition’s ancestors. Nevertheless, I distinctly recall—likely after one too many shots of reposado cactus juice—accosting the unfortunate lad in the Pioneer, the Western Folklife Center’s watering hole, with the suggestion that someday his passion for music just might evolve into creating his own songs. 

Never before, or since, have I experienced a repulsion akin to, say, Dracula coming face-to-face with garlands of elephant garlic, a necklace of silver crucifixes, a veritable sun shower of holy water, and a sharpened wooden stake aimed at the heart. As in, “That’s not what I do, period, full stop, amen-n-begone, and don’t ever tempt me again with the evil notion, Zarzyski.”  Ouch, indeed.

Twenty-plus years and a half-dozen faded “Shit Happens” bumper stickers later, as well as in the wake of futile pitches of numerous revisions of my lyric, “8 Bucks & Change,” to every musician-Friend I knew, BINGO! Obviously, the Ol’ Cowpoke Cosmos, The Musical Universe, is an avid fan of tenacity, of the motto “get bucked off, climb right back on.”

Andy zeroed-in musically to the lyric’s sentiment, which I’ve always considered a throwback to the themes and pay phone times of my rodeo-poet hero, Chris LeDoux. To boot, what an additional throwback hoot to have it included on an honest-to-goodness album—you bet, an LP vinyl record—and not just any album, but one that features a symbiotic choreography of songs and Andy’s cowboy poetry recitations, as powerful as any I’ve lent a bardic ear to during my purt-near 4-decade tenure as a reciter of both the old and the new.

If you haven’t surmised by now, Andy has one spur solidly buried in the shoulder of cowboy-poetry-n-music’s bygone era and the other spur fightin’ for holts in the shoulder of the genre’s renaissance. And for my Polish-Mafioso-Rodeo-Poet mazuma, he’s sittin’ pretty in the middle with a leg on each side.  What a humbling honor to work with him. And what a monumental three-quarter-century birthday gift he’s so graciously left on my WELCOME! mat welcoming the next quarter century of creative graces.

     

             ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~