After a colorful career that has taken him from professional gunfighting to wrangling horses, Cowboy Doug Davis now prefers playing western swing style rhythm guitar in the hill country. Every 4th Wednesday you can find him wrangling musicians at the Luckenbach jam session. Photo by Phil Houseal

Details:
Cowboy Doug Davis plays the 4th Wednesday of each month at Luckenbach, and can also be heard at Hondo's and the Hilltop. Contact Cowboy Doug and the Noteropers ("whoever shows up that day") via email at theroughstring@hotmail.com, or on MySpace at www.myspace.com/thenoteropers.

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Cowboy Doug

by Phil Houseal
Feb 7, 2007

I first encountered Cowboy Doug Davis hanging out at Hondo's. In his jeans and boots, with sweat-stained cowboy hat framing his etched, bearded face, he could have walked off the set of a western movie. Turns out, he did. He played a part in the movie "American Outlaws" that was filmed in Austin.

"There wasn't much acting to it," he offered. "Mostly just standing around. I did have a speaking part." He worked his face into character, then cupped his hand to his mouth and yelled, "Estan escapando!"

Besides acting, Cowboy Doug has been a camp cook, vacuum cleaner salesman, oil field roughneck, professional gunfighter, bartender, and musician. I heard him accompanying champion fiddler Bart Trotter one recent Sunday morning for a Windows on Texas event.

His acoustic rhythm guitar work is deceptively steady western swing style. Deceptive, because he makes it look easy. He is doing the work of an entire band, laying down a solid rhythm, with moving bass line, and changing jazz chords on every beat.

"And that was early in the morning," he added with a grin. "Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been making music of some sort or another. I started playing guitar around age 12. I also played trumpet in the school band and sang in the choir at church."

Cowboy Doug grew up in Virginia, but sounds more Texan than most Texans sound. ("I've now lived in Texas longer than I lived in Virginia," he explained. "A lot of the early Texas Rangers were from Virginia; I figure I’m carrying on the tradition of Virginians with sense enough to move to Texas.") He got to Texas through Nashville, where he first tried to find fame and fortune.

"When that didn't work out, we heard Austin was cool, so we went to Austin," he said. There he met up with a group of old-time western swing musicians. "That's where I saw how all that moving chord work was done."

Talking to Cowboy Doug, you notice that every answer holds a nugget of information about another fascinating part of his life. It's like finding gold in a pan of pebbles.

For example:

"I met Bart Trotter when I was on a cross-country horse trip," Cowboy Doug said. "We were resting our horses in Ruidosa, and this guy said you got to hear this band that's playing out at the Flying J. We got out there and Bart was playing fiddle with a guy that wasn't backing him up the way I thought he should. I asked if he'd mind if I picked one with him. We launched into something and hit it off from the first note."

Nugget: Cross-country horse trip?

"A lady I know started riding a horse from Terlingua," he explained. "I was giving her vehicle support until she reached the Guadalupe Mountains. Then I left my car there and bought a horse and rode the rest of the way to Santa Fe with her. It took us two or three months." He laughed. "It just seemed like the thing to do."

Nugget: Living in Terlingua?

"I took two weeks off to play music for the chili cookoff there," he said. "I got back 11 years later. In Terlingua, I did a lot of pack trips and dude wrangling."

Nugget: Dude wrangling?

"I worked on lot of ranches and racetracks, including Belmont Park and Churchill Downs," he went on. "I was an exercise boy and a groom."

So how did Cowboy Doug the cowboy decide to become Cowboy Doug the guitar player?

"I wasn’t really trying to make a living at music then, but every once in a while I got a job that paid so good it spoiled me for regular work," he said. "Ha ha!"

Even though he's not a writer of songs ("every time I start one, it seems like someone else already wrote it"), Cowboy Doug has burnished his nuggets of experience into cowboy logic.

"If I had to boil it down, I guess, I'd say I wouldn't do anything for money that I wouldn't do for free if I was independently wealthy."

So that means money is not important?

"Nope. It means I'm broke all the time."

So he wouldn't give up music to, say... work in a bank? His response was not a surprise.

"Actually, I did work in a bank while I was in high school," he said. "The thing is, I'm so crippled up now, I can't work cowboying. At this point, music is about all I can do that pays anything, that I can do sitting down."

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