R.W. Hampton

Riding For His Own Brand

Unfortunately, those who live on family ranches in the West are often voiceless so it's been up to western singers and cowboy poets to promote ranching culture and the way of life. Also, it's often been the singers and poets who have been able to sustain the cowboy lifestyle in these economic hard times because they're picking up outside income.

R.W. Hampton has a small family ranch in New Mexico. It is a life that he loves and is devoted to. His family is a ranching family; his children help on the ranch and R.W. and his wife, Lisa, wouldn't trade that lifestyle for gold. But it's the singing and the show biz ranch going. On the other side of that coin, it's that small family ranch that is the foundation for the songs, acting and show biz side that keeps R.W. Hampton going.

Early Years

Richard Wade Hampton - known during his early years as Little Dicky - was born in Houston on June 17, 1957, but doesn't remember a thing about the city. He was named after Wade Hampton, a cavalry leader in the Civil War who served under J.E.B. Stuart and rose through the ranks to become a Lieutenant General, then later became Governor of South Carolina and then U.S. Senator.

Hampton's father was in the Air Force and served in the Air Defense Command and jobs in the service involve moving around so the first town Dicky remembers is Great Falls, Montana, "Charlie Russell country," he says. They didn't stay there long, either, and because his father was worried he would be sent to some really out-of-the-way place - people in Air Defense Command manned outposts all over the world - he mustered out of the Air Force and the family settled in Sherman, Texas, a small town located just south of the Oklahoma state line, where he took a job as a salesman for Mrs. Tucker's Shortening.

"If my parents had any musical ability, they never revealed it," said Hampton. "But we always had music in the house. We had records by Jo Stafford, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Eddy Arnold. At supper time, they always put on some music to play." There may have been a way that Hampton secretly "inherited" a musical gene; he reports than when his mother was very pregnant with him, she attended the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo where Gene Autry performed.

Boy Scouts

Dicky joined the Boy Scouts and excelled; he is an Eagle Scout. During his high school years "Dicky" became Dick Hampton. A turning point in his life came after his second two-week trip out to Philmont, the Scout ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico, the summer of 1974. The ranch, located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains has 137,500 acres where Scouts engage in high adventure 100 mile back country trecks over a two week period.

Dick worked at Philmont for three summers, 1974 - 1976, with their livestock. His jobs there included helping take care of the 350 ranch horses kept for Scouts and working with their herd of Hereford.

Growing Up and Out

Meanwhile, back in Texas the Hampton family moved to Richardson, a suburb of Dallas, where his father worked as a salesman for Anderson-Clayton Foods. Dick had a horse, boarded at a stable run by Walter Pittman just outside of town, and Dick used to ride his bicycle there in order to ride his horse. "It seemed like everybody had a horse back, then," remembers Hampton. "And every little town had a rodeo."

Hampton graduated from high school in 1975 and "just wanted to be a cowboy." He worked for several large ranches in New Mexico, including the Red River Ranch. "There are two kinds of employees on those big ranches," remembered Hampton. "Young single guys got hired in the Spring and Fall for rounding up cattle and breaking horses. The married guys had more permanent jobs year round."

Hampton was "living the dream," he said. "I had a three speed Chevy pickup, a second hand saddle and an Ovation guitar." That's about all he owned but he had no problem making a living. "I was making about $300 a month with $60 a month payment on my pick-up and there was nothing else to spend money on," he remembered.

From the Red River Ranch he moved to the Spade Ranch, northwest of Tucumcari, where he worked for a couple of years. He was always a hard worker and when he was hired the foreman usually told him, "You're hired for the Spring and then we'll see how it goes." It always seemed to go pretty well and he remembered something his father always told him, "Don't ever leave a place you can't go back to." That allowed Hampton to go back to some ranches for a second hire when he needed a job.

Dick Hampton became "R.W." on the Fulton Ranch because the cook's name was Dick Shepherd, and you can't have two people with the same name on a ranch. He's been R.W. ever since but old friends from way back still call him Dick. Photo by Denver Crowder

Musical Roots

Music, for Hampton, started with a Harmony guitar and country music on the radio. During the early 1970s, as Hampton entered his teen years, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Charley Pride and Marty Robbins ruled the airwaves. Most of those songs were fairly easy to learn and so Hampton sat on the edge of his bed and played and sang. Sometimes his brother or father would walk down the hall and shut the door to his bedroom.

Hampton liked Lefty Frizzell so he sang in that high, piercing, soulful voice. In the early 70s Lefty was on the radio with songs like "Railroad Lady," "I Never Go Around Mirrors" and a song that Merle Haggard wrote, "Life's Like Poetry." He especially loved Marty Robbins and especially the song, "Man Walks Amongst Us." Hampton loved the classic Robbins songs like "El Paso," "Don't Worry," and "Devil Woman" as well as Robbins hits during Hampton's teenage years, like "My Woman, My Woman, My Wife," "El Paso City" and "Among My Souvenirs."

And then there was John Denver, who was not only popular with country audiences, but had a young, pop following as well. Hampton did not play in a band; instead, he played in the courtyard at school where he attracted girls with songs like "Take Me Home, Country Roads," "Sunshine On My Shoulders," "Annie's Song" and "Back Home Again."

On the ranches where he worked, there were no TV sets in the bunkhouses where he stayed and sometimes no electricity. Hampton played, sang and began to write songs simply to entertain himself. He didn't play for gatherings of cowboys, although sometimes a cowboy - while playing cards - might yell over to him, "play that song you wrote again." It gave him an inner joy but it never let him dream of stardom.

On the ranches, Hampton went out each day and either cattle or started colts.

The Performer is Born

The first time R.W. Hampton ever walked on a stage and sang to an "audience" was in 1978 when Dub Waldrup, the manager of the Spade Ranch, invited him to a cattlemen's awards program in Lubbock to sing "Little Joe, The Wrangler." Waldrup had heard Hampton sing the song and knew one of the honorees, Albert Mitchell, loved that song.

"There was Texas ranch royalty in that room," remembered Hampton. "People from the big ranches - guys I'd heard of - were there. I only played that one song but I remember thinking, 'I like this.'" That performance led to invitations to other cattlemen's gathering. Hampton was told, "We'll get you time off, a motel room and we'll feed you. We'll treat you so many ways you're bound to like one of 'em." And indeed he did; which led him to performing at more of these functions through the years.

At the Cowboy Symposium, organized by Alvin Davis in Lubbock, Texas, Hampton was invited to sing and some folks from Adobe Records in Shallowwater, Texas. They invited him to record his second album, The One I Could Never Ride, at Lanny Fiel's studio in Lubbock.

But as far as professional advancement, Hampton was lost. "I didn't know how to get gigs," he said. "I was totally at the mercy of people who heard me." Often, someone would be in the audience who was involved in a cowboy festival and he'd get invited to play.

Burrs Under the Saddle

If it was a bumpy ride to get in front of an audience, back on the home front there were a batch of pot holes and speed bumps as well. Hampton had gotten married in 1981 and his first child was born in 1986. He continued to work on large ranches and generally lived in "a fairly decent house" out on a line camp. It was a busy life, looking after that section of the ranch but the social life was still important. "I remember we'd spend a whole lot of time usually on a Friday or Saturday driving to somebody's house or a school gymnasium where there'd be a barbecue or dance or some music. Then we'd drive back in time to take care of the morning chores." When you live that far out, no drive is too far for some socializing.

His first wife, Denise, never really discouraged him, but he wasn't encouraged either. "Her idea was that she wished it would work but chances are it wouldn't. It was something to get out of my system or be a nice hobby. Well' I'm not a hobby guy."

It's hard enough to make it in music and if you don't have someone pulling with you a hundred and ten percent, well, the odds get a lot longer. A performer needs emotional support - there's a lot of rejection and frustration in the music business - and without a life partner fully behind you, the frustrations and discouragements multiply and build into a giant obstacle. Work was another problem; festivals want to book you well ahead of time but a ranch foreman was likely to say (and did), "Well, when we get up to that date, if we're ahead of the work then you can take a few days off."

New Beginnings

Trying to ride for a ranch's brand was a struggle and so was his marriage, which ended in 1995. Still, Hampton trudged on, raising his daughter and two boys on his own.

Back in 1988 "I decided I'd go for it," said Hampton. "I found a place where I could live and traded work for a home on the Flying M Ranch. I sought outside ranch work and became a day working cowboy - a week here, three or four days there - so that I could slip away and play when the calls came in."

Hampton had played Elko around 1986 and that event gave him a new perspective on performing. "I didn't know any other place where I could sing for that many people," he said. He met some people backstage like Gary Brown, who worked on the festivals in Visalia and Santa Clarita and booked him on the Rogue River Festival. That led to some breaks but, still, "the phone didn't ring much."

Navigating the Western World

Part of the problem was that Hampton was deeply immersed in a culture that said you don't go out and seek fame and success; it should come to you. Promoting yourself is uncomfortable and unwelcome and real cowboys don't do it; instead, they feel that praise and honors should come on their own, unsolicited.

"That's kinda the way it is in western music," said Hampton. "You're not supposed to promote yourself and I'm fine with that - I don't like doing it and I really don't like other people doing it that much." But this is a world where success is something you go for; you form a game plan, set goals and work towards them. He who waits for success to come will generally end up sitting and waiting their whole life.

Born To Be A Cowboy

Shortly after the album on Adobe, the label chose to leave the record business. However, John Parkin and Bob Coffee, two of Don Edwards' friends in Fort Worth, liked R.W. and decided to put up the money for him to record a third album. Parkin and Coffee told him that if he made enough money on it, he could pay them back - but there was no timetable.

That album, recorded in Garland, Texas and produced by Rich O'Brien, was released ten years after his first album, Travelin' Light and contained the song "Born to Be a Cowboy." "I had the idea because I thought that being a cowboy was every boy's dream," said R.W. "And so I wrote the song around that idea."

The album found itself on Michael Martin Murphey's tour bus and Hampton remembers two of Murphey's band members, Gary Roller and Leroy Featherstrone, telling him how much they loved "Born to Be a Cowboy." Later, Murphey called him before recording the song and talked to him about editing the song - it was originally seven minutes long - for commercial considerations on Murphey's album.

The Last Cowboy

Hampton's one man play, "The Last Cowboy" evolved from a raspy throat. "My brother lined up a gig at Poor David's Pub in Dallas," remembered Hampton, "and I was losing my voice; it was about played out. So that night I did more talking than usual, told some cowboy stories and some magic happened. Around that time Hal Holbrook was touring the country with his one man play on Mark Twain so the idea of a one man play was in the air. We talked to David Marquis, a playwright, and he has a theater background so he came up with the idea of making this character the last cowboy. And then my brother thought it should be a kind of spirit - that this guy grew up in Tennessee and moved to Texas after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. That put him where the cowboy evolved with the cattle drives and then on to the singing cowboys. We raised some seed money and put it on in Dallas for a summer run and wanted to take it to New York for off Broadway but the money dried up so that never happened. Years later, my wife Lisa thought we should record it as an album - hit some of the high points in the story and all of the songs - and I wasn't too excited about it until we got into the studio. Our producer, Rich O'Brien caught Lisa's vision right away and eventually that led to our first Wrangler Award."

Hampton still performs the one man show on occasion.

Movies

The dramatic side of Hampton has also shown up in his movie work. He first appeared in a Tv special, "Kenny Rogers and the American Cowboy." R.W. was involved in ranch scenes as well as concert scenes. He sang "Ghost Riders In The Sky" and then Rogers sang "Sweet Baby James." Six years after that special, Kenny Rogers was doing a CBS movie of the week and Ken Kragen, Rogers' manager, tracked Hampton down, telling him "you're hard to find!"

The movie called for Hampton to sing "Ghost Riders" again but that could not be his only appearance in the movie because his character needed to be developed. "We worked for a month on the movie," said Hampton, "and the two worlds really came together. I played a character called 'R.W.' and joined the Screen Actor's Guild. They paid me Union scale and I thought they paid me more money than a person should make for doing what I was doing. So I decided to pursue that."

Hampton currently has the support of a Hollywood agent but most of his calls have come from production companies that know about his work. He appeared in some spaghetti westerns "usually playing a bad guy" directed by Terrence Hill and worked with Kris Kristofferson on the HBO movie "The Tracker."

"Kris is a gem, a genius. He not only knew his own lines but he knew everybody else's lines. He was incredibly dedicated and professional, always on time and nobody ever waited for him. I was always impressed by his intelligence."

Lisa

Along the trail, R.W. tried marriage again, and this time it was meant to be. Lisa has been a great source of strength and support for R.W. Ironically, he met her father first. "Lisa's Dad is a real gregarious guy, a larger than life person. You always know when he's in the room," said R.W. "I met him backstage at Elko one year and he kept saying, in a loud voice, 'you're a helluva singer!' A few years later he came to the Rogue River Roundup in Medford, Oregon with his daughter. She captured my eye, my heart and my soul."

R.W. had three kids from his first marriage and Lisa had one child; together they added two more so the Hampton children range in age from three to 32.

The Entertainer

There's a difference between being an artist or musician and being an entertainer. R.W. Hampton always appreciated and admired entertainers.

"I know some people say all they want to do is play music and sing even if they can't make a living," said Hampton. "I'm not one of those people. I could never see myself sitting in a Holiday Inn Lounge with a drum machine playing night after night."

Hampton went to country music shows and learned from Marty Robbins and Merle Haggard about entertainment. "I saw Marty Robbins at a dinner theater in Dallas," said Hampton. "And I managed to get backstage and had a wonderful visit with him. He was so versatile and could really entertain an audience - he's the one who got me into entertainment and havingfun on stage. I felt that a dinner theater was a great place to play. I also saw Merle Haggard a number of times and realized that dimension in him."

R.W. was also inspired by Tony Bennett. "Lisa and I went to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo," remembers R.W. "There were 58,000 people and Tony came out and stood on a stage the size of a postage stamp with his trio in front of a rodeo crowd. He didn't wear a cowboy hat or try to sing cowboy songs. He just sang and the crowd ate it up."

There's a strong message to be who you are and do what you do - no matter where you are or who is in the audience. Tony Bennett delivered that message to R.W. with his performance in Houston.

Clearview Ranch

R.W. and Lisa were living on the Flying M Ranch in a camp but yearned for a place of their own. "We talked about a new life and a new place. Lisa was fully supportive; she wanted to be a partner in my life and in my dream," said R.W. "So we came about 100 miles west of where we started and looked around. We found the Clearview Ranch and we bought it." It's a small, family ranch - a working ranch - and it is both a physical and spiritual home to R.W. Hampton. It's a bit of his paradise on Earth, although he openly admits that paradise has its share of problems.

"Ranches across America are really struggling," said R.W. "The price of beef keeps fluctuating. You start them on grass and then send them to a feedlot and the price of grain has gone up - some of that due to corn being used for ethanol - and then transportation has gone up. Diesel fuel going over $5 a gallon in some places was a blow. Global warming or whatever you want to call it is nothing new, draught cycles have been going on out here for a long while - we didn't get enough snow on the mountains this past winter and we haven't had much rain so we decided not to run any cattle this year."…

R.W.'s ranch takes on steers after they've been weaned and grazes then until around October. The steers usually go from about 450 pounds to 800 pounds the Hamptons get paid by weight - so much for so many pounds. This minimizes the risk for them.

"There's people with deeded ranches that have been in their family for over a hundred years and they're in danger of disappearing," said R.W. "They've lost portions of their place because of inheritance taxes and it's just hard to make a living. We used to feed our country but we don't any more. There's cheap food coming in from outside our country and that hurts the family ranch, which can't compete with those cheap prices. It's like we've got a certain number of gigs for western singers but if all of a sudden western singers start coming in from all over the world and they're charging less - we can't make a living."

Today's Ranchers and Cowboys

"The job of the modern day rancher is in jeopardy," said Hampton. "He is the most highly skilled and most underpaid worker around. You need to know about a lot of things to work on a ranch. But the ranch jobs are drying up. It used to be that you could always get hired on the big ranches but they're not employing as many cowboys as they used to. They just can't afford to."

When you live on the land, the weather is always a concern. It's got to rain the right amount at the right time and then not rain at the right time - and the weather seldom works that way. "We live and die by weather patterns," said R.W. "Whenever I fly somewhere, I check into the hotel and turn on the weather channel."

Professional Steps

"Lisa came from a background in real estate," said R.W. "So she was used to selling people what they didn't want or need and that fit right in with helping me get gigs," he laughed. "Before we got married I would leave with a guitar, suitcase and plastic grocery sack of CDs. I did no accounting and gave most of them away. She said, 'let me take this over' and when she did we started making money from CD sales. Sometimes the money we made on CD sales is more than the fee I received."

With Lisa's help, R.W.'s career rose to a new level, but to go higher he needed an outside manager. Both came to that realization at the same time. "We were both in the bathroom one morning - each in our own mirror - and she said 'we gotta talk' and I said 'we gotta talk' and we both said 'we can't do this anymore; it's gotten too big' That's exactly hot that happened."

R.W. had been talking with Scott O'Malley for awhile and he also talked with a few others, but the name Brian Ferriman kept coming up. R.W. knew of his work with Brenn Hill and was impressed. Finally, R.W. called him and Brian flew to Albuquerque and they met. Brian listened to R.W.'s dreams and ideas and agreed to manage him, saying 'I don't know exactly what will happen, but let's try it."

"Brian has such great expertise," said R.W. "Cowboy festivals were my world and at those, you get a set fee and usually about 20 minutes to play. They run you on and off like you're in a cattle chute and if the person ahead of you takes up too much time, then you've only got ten minutes. Brian said 'you can't really develop your show like that.'"

"Brian got me into things where what you are paid is negotiable. We started playing performance halls and then I became spokesman for Atwood's Ranch and Home Superstores, which are in the Midwest. I could never have done that without Brian. And a lot of other things came where people said they had always wanted me but didn't think they could get me. Brian made the phone calls to do those things. He also got us a larger presence on the web and exposure in Europe."

R.W. has played the east side of the big river a few times but wants to expand his audience over there. "There's an audience not being reached," he said. "Most of my shows are in the West but there's no reason that the cowboy can't draw a crowd in other places."

Riding for His Brand

R.W. Hampton did not start out looking for an audience; an audience found him. When that audience first found him, it gave R.W. a taste of what being a singer of western songs and ranching culture could be. "I'm probably fairly driven in an understated way," said R.W. That seems to be a nice combination for western music, which doesn't like it when performers seem too pushy or ambitious.

Success never arrives solo and if someone isn't pushing their own career, then others must be around to lend a hand. R.W. Hampton has been blessed to have people like Don Edwards, Charlie Daniels, Ian Tyson, Dave Corlew and Red Steagall on his side. They've all played an important part in his life and been supportive in tangible, solid ways.

And yet the life of a western singer is like a long, hard, dusty cattle drive. There's problems and pitfalls every step of the way and the payoff only comes at the end of the drive, once the goods have been delivered. It's a trail where endurance and an unshakeable belief that you're doing what God has put you on this Earth to do is what keeps you going. No matter what happens, what setbacks occur, life is meaningful and fulfilled when you live your mission in life.

"My faith is important," said R.W. "God has given me some talent and I want to use it. My family is also important so giving up my family is not part of the plan. But I believe there's bound to be some way to make this all happen in a family atmosphere."

That's the trail that R.W. Hampton rides and no one doubts that the goods will always be delivered.

DON CUSIC
All materials courtesy of the Western Music Association

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