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.

As the couple left that October day they wrote a blessing and hung it on a kitchen wall, in the spot where their clock once ticked, expecting never to return.

Sixteen years later, the couple runs a thriving recording business from an upstairs bedroom in that same 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.

"The creativity has only come through the hard times," said Overcast, whose 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 a number on the East Coast. The variety show features skits, cowboy music performers and advertising in the tradition of "A Prairie Home Companion."

Dawn's goal is to get Overcast on 100 stations within a year.

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.

An artist with a cause

High school sweethearts, Ken and Dawn were both born and raised on the Hi-Line within 15 minutes of Chinook. Each has roots in the area 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 said in a recent interview at the ranch.

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., which draws a crowd of roughly 2,000. "He puts his heart in there, and you know that as soon as he starts."

Music you can dance to

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."

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, who 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 said. "But he has that ability, when he's standing in front of an audience, that you think he's talking just to you."

Miller recalled playing in a concert with Overcast in Havre a few years ago with a full band, when Overcast suddenly seemed to forget the song.

"He just started singing Happy Birthday," Miller said. "And everybody just followed along with him and the crowd just roared."

No country please

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," he said. "It drives me nuts."

He mostly listens to jazz and bluegrass.

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 said. "...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."

Stolen shtick

The Overcasts started Bear Valley Records in 1993. Dawn, who has made a career of the music promotions business, 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 said. "We're all Americans in cowboy hats."

Although Overcast records his albums in Nashville 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 said. "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."

No bull

Overcast comes by his act honestly.

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

Even the black patch over his right eye, part of his rugged cowboy look, is no put-on.

Overcast was a relative newlywed when he started breaking a horse for Dawn's uncle.

An avid bull rider, he'd been making the filly buck as he rode past a picture window, hoping to catch the eye of his bride.

"Unfortunately, the horse was learning how to buck faster than I was learning to ride," he said.

In order to stay on, Overcast tightened down the saddle.

On Christmas Eve he tried to loosen a leather lace that was stuck in a narrow hole on the saddle. Unable to budge it, he grabbed a pair of needle nose pliers.

As he worked the lace, the pliers slipped and stabbed him in the eye.

"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.

Going broke like Christians

The young couple worked hard.

Before the kids 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 said.

On Oct. 15, 1987, with the ranch in default, the family had to leave their home.

In order to keep the bitterness at bay, the couple left behind a blessing.

"Lord, we ask your blessing on this dear old home. We ask that you will bless those who live here as you have blessed us...," it began.

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

Miracles

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

"So we got our blessing back," said 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 sell down their cattle herd from roughly 400 head to 130 head in recent years. But Ken says they'll never sell out.

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