CHINOOK -- First they took the cows, then the machinery.

Finally, the debt collector kicked Ken and Dawn Overcast out of their brick ranch house in Chinook, Mont.

Even the black patch over his right eye, part of his rugged cowboy look, is no put-on.  Early in the Overcast's marriage, he was using needle-nose pliers to loosen a leather lace on a saddle when the pliers slipped and stabbed him in the eye.

As the couple left that October day they wrote a blessing and hung it on a kitchen wall, expecting never to return.

Sixteen years later, they run a thriving recording business from  that house. Outside, cattle low in the corrals.

Working on his eighth CD, Ken, 56, sometimes draws on those years, at the worst of the '80s farm crisis, for inspiration.

His sixth album, "Montana Cowboy," was named the "Best Cowboy Music CD" in True West Magazine's second annual "Best of the West" awards last month.

Other honorees in the leading Western Magazine included Tom Selleck, Marty Robbins and the late Johnny Cash.

In 2000 Overcast won the coveted "Will Rogers Yodeler of the Year" award from the Academy of Western Artists.

Overcast's book of cowboy poetry, "Yesterday's Yarns," is selling nationwide, and his syndicated radio program, "The Cowboy Show," is on 30 stations, including some on the East Coast. The variety show features skits, cowboy music performers and advertising in the tradition of "A Prairie Home Companion."

Their thriving recording company, Bear Valley Records, has carried the couple through at least four years of drought on the Hi-Line and the latest downturn in the farm and ranch economy.

"We'd have never made it without this career," Dawn says.

But both say their music and publishing business is less a career than a cause.

"Our western lifestyle is what our passion is," Dawn says.

Raising awareness

The high school sweethearts were born and raised on the Hi-Line within 15 minutes of Chinook. Their roots are at least three generations deep.

"Our mailing address hasn't changed for 100 years," Ken likes to say.

But with each generation, their community is fading as drought and dwindling farm profits push families off their land.

The goal is "to try to raise the awareness of the vanishing lifestyle and the people who are sacrificing to maintain it," Ken says.

In one of his most popular poems, "The Mist of the Wild Rose," a sad cowboy wanders into a haunted, abandoned ranch -- a symbol of the dying communities of rural eastern Montana.

Many of the family farmers or ranchers who have gone broke or sold out have been friends and neighbors.

"It's not just that he wrote about something that happened," said Audrey Slater, who hires Overcast to perform at Wet Mountain Western Days in Westcliffe, Colo.  "He puts his heart in there, and you know that as soon as he starts."

But this ain't cry-in-yer-whiskey country music. Nor is it music television fare.  "Cowboy music" has an acoustic sound and folksy lyrics sung simply.

"Nobody gets drunk or left their wife and got run over and landed in jail. None of that," Dawn said. "You can have your kids listen to it and sing it in church."

From experiences

Overcast draws his inspiration from his life.

A poem from "Yesterday's Yarns" spins a comic tale of an encounter with a newfangled "miker-wave oven." One of his most personal songs, the deeply religious "Praise," is named for his stillborn granddaughter, whom the family buried two days before Christmas in 2000.

Most of his work is upbeat.

"His music has a rhythm that a lot of country western singers don't have," said Sheri Miller, a Chinook rancher and pianist who played with Overcast in a gospel group in the '80s. "Even our gospel music you could have danced to."

Overcast's magic is his stage presence.

"A lot of people can entertain, and a lot of people are good at it," Slater says. "But he has that ability, when he's standing in front of an audience, that you think he's talking just to you."

Overcast says he tries to take his audience on a journey.

"The goal I have as an entertainer is to move my audience emotionally and keep moving them emotionally from tears to laughter, tears to laughter so when they're done they say, 'Wow, I've been someplace without ever leaving my chair.'"

He never watches TV because "it screws up your thinking. I want original thought."

He also tunes out country music.  "I can't listen to it.  It drives me nuts."

He mostly listens to jazz and bluegrass.

Began at a young age

Overcast doesn't come from a musical family.

He debuted at a Montana Farmer's Union youth camp talent show at the age of 9 with Hank Williams Sr.'s "Lonesome Whistle."

"It was probably horrible, but two or three of the little nine-year-old girls just swooned and that was enough," he said. "I was hooked."

As a young man he played country tunes in bars and clubs for grocery money. But he was never willing to travel far.

"I've played with so many musicians who lost their families," Overcast says. "...When they got off the road their wife didn't live there anymore."

He didn't compose his own music or lyrics until a local pastor asked him to sing at church. He couldn't think of anything appropriate, so he wrote a few tunes.

"I thought, 'Golly, they're pretty good. I should record these.'"

Working independently

The Overcasts started Bear Valley Records in 1993. Dawn spends hours on the phone setting up gigs and pitching Ken's albums, book and radio show.  European radio loves him.

"They don't know the difference, really, between Garth Brooks and Ken Overcast," Ken says. "We're all Americans in cowboy hats."

Although Overcast records his albums in Nashville, Tenn., and has performed at the prestigious Bluebird Cafe, he hasn't pursued a major record label. The couple likes to do things the rancher way -- independently.

Overcast misses out on the publicity a major label could buy, but his sales profits are his own.

Most of his ideas come to him while working around the ranch -- driving tractor or feeding cows.

"The Lord has really blessed me with an ability to be content," Overcast says. "I can be out shoveling manure, or I can be on stage playing my guitar in front of a few thousand people, and it's all the same to me."

He can't resist a shot at the music television cowboys and their spotless white hats.

"They've stolen our shtick is what they've done," he said. "It's been very successful for them, but they're not cowboys."

Overcast comes by his act honestly.

"I think Kenny would have been happiest born around the 1890s," Miller says. "He's an
old-timer at heart. He likes going riding after the cows when the rest of us take four-wheelers."

"Dawn said, 'You know, you're going to kill yourself the way you're going, and I want some children to remember you by.'"

Their son, T.J., was born in 1971 and daughter Karleen was born in 1974.

Before the children were born, Dawn taught at a remote country school near the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation.  Her salary helped them get a start in the ranching business.

Ken flew her to work in his Dad's four-seater Cessna every Monday morning and picked her up Friday afternoon.  The future looked promising, but the farm crisis of the '80s caught up with them.

"There was about 10 years where it was just terrible," Ken says.

Hard times

On Oct. 15, 1987, with the ranch in default, the family had to leave.  They left a blessing behind in order to keep the bitterness at bay.

"Our faith is really important to us," Ken says. "How do you go broke like a Christian? How can you be a positive witness to your faith when things are not going right?"

By a series of what the Overcasts call miracles, including a buy-back option and some unexpected help, the family regained the house seven months later.

"So we got our blessing back," says Ken, who tells the story when he preaches at cowboy church.

Those years were the inspiration for his gospel album "Silver and Gold," his first commercial recording.

The story sounds like a fairy tale. In fact, the Overcast's seven grandchildren, at least those old enough to talk, call their turn-of-the-century, two-story home the "white castle."

Ivy clings to one side of the house and a lazy creek runs by the front yard like a moat -- the perfect setting for grandpa's stories about princes and princesses.

"I make up some big line of B.S.," Overcast says.

But the Overcasts know all too well that most farm default stories don't have a happy ending.

And without farms and ranches, there's no cowboy poetry and no cowboy music.  Drought has forced the Overcasts to reduce their cattle herd, but Ken says they'll never sell out.

"I'd quit the music long before I'd quit that."