By Mack McConnell

   From Havre Montana to Phoenix, Arizona, a new, Montana-born radio show has taken the airwaves. Will Rogers Award winning singer Ken Overcast is the producer and star of the weekly Cowboy Show.
   His music and poetry could be called hard-core cowboy, earthy, down-home or western. It is not, however, the kind of western music you hear on most of the pop-western stations. Ken talks about the show as his wife Dawn sets lunch on the red and white checkered table cloth on the kitchen tabled in a recent interview in their ranch house near Chinook.
   “They don’t hear this kind of music on the radio,” he says. “And they can’t tell if they like it if they haven’t heard it. I’m a little picky about what I put on the show. It has to be quality.”
   The show includes the music of other artists as well as his own. It is interspersed with humor and usually an interview of some cowboy personality.
   It takes the non-initiated a little time to catch onto the lingo and flavor of the music. It’s pure cowboy. The show reflects cowboy values and attitudes Ken feels are sorely missing today.
   “I think the world started down hill when they took the cowboys out of the Saturday afternoon movie matinees,” Ken says.
   Overcast has also used his ability to spin a web mixing reality with legend to write a humorous book, “Yesterday’s Yarns, Real Tales from the Real West.” While many of the tales are truth-based, some of them are supplemented with products of Ken’s fertile imagination. He has been said to both “raise and dispense B.S.”
   “If everything didn’t happen just the way I said it did, it could have,” says Ken. Occasionally, he feel the need to point out what is the “plumb truth.”
   “You have to laugh at life,” he says. What makes you laugh won’t hurt you.”
   Although there is considerable planning involved in his radio shows, Ken just “wings” a lot of it.
   “I’m a good thinker under pressure,” he says. “I think it’s because my whole life has been pressurized.”
   Ken Writes and sings from the first-hand perspective of a real-life ranch cowboy. His roots run generations deep in the Chinook area prairie where his ancestors settled late in the 19th century.
   “Our mail box number hasn’t changed in over a hundred years,” he says with a proud smile.

   Ken began playing his guitar and singing in a dance band while in high school, playing mostly at local functions. His reputation grew over the years and he has become a popular entertainer throughout the region. His cowboy hatted visage with a patch over on eye is highly recognizable in western music and poetry circles. Ken lost the eye in a ranch accident not long after he and Dawn were married.
   Ken laughs when he says children refer to him as “the pirate cowboy.”
   Although he has recorded several CDs and received national recognition, including the title National Champion Yodeler, he has never wanted to move to Nashville and become part of that country music scene.   
   “That’s just not me,” he says. One of his most cherished titles is “Favorite Grandad.” His children T.J. Overcast and Karleen Halingstad and the seven grandchildren live close to the family ranch and although Ken still travels a lot to perform, he spends as much time at home as he can. That is one reason he and Dawn, who is also his business manager, decided to set up a studio and produce a taped radio show in the ranch house. 
   “I did a lot of research before we bought the equipment and put it in the studio,” says Ken, “and my experience in making recordings in Nashville was helpful. The show has to be professional and radio-friendly.”
   He started recording the shows this year and already nine Montana stations and ten out of state stations carry them.
   Ken still performs on the road. “I do a lot of Chamber of Commerce and corporate gigs along with cowboy poetry conventions and western festivities,” he says.
   The Overcasts have a “full plate” with his road work and his work in the studio while Dawn markets seven CDs, the book and the radio show. He also writes a column for the Prairie Star newspaper. This life-long entertainer shows no signs of slowing down.
   For more information about Ken, his CDs and his book, write to Bear Valley Records, Box 1542 Chinook, Montana 59523, call toll-free 1-888-753-7611 or go to the Bear Valley Records internet site, www.kenovercast.com .