Musician at home at the grange

DOUG REED’S PRAYER is simple: “May you have food and shelter, a saddle for your head. May you be years in heaven, before the devil knows you are dead.”

He hears the words to music not yet written, but he’ll write it soon. Doug, 62, knows he can now. He filled a CD with his words and music this year and people are buying it.

“I’m probably not the best singer in the world. I’m rough,” Doug says, smiling shyly. “I like to tell a story. If you don’t tell a story, it’s not a song.”

His tenor is thin and occasionally wavy and fits the cowboy lyrics he likes to write. His songs belong in a Roy Rogers movie, in a gathering of tired cowboys around a campfire, at a grange hall dance on Saturday nights.

”Will you meet me tonight in the moonlight, at the end of the old dusty lane? If you can’t come tonight come tomorrow. I can’t wait to see you again,” Doug sings in waltz time. It’s easy to visualize men in white shirts and string ties and women in dresses full from petticoats sweeping around a dance floor in three-quarter time.

Doug runs Dynamite Auctions from his home between Rathdrum and Hauser Lake. He wrote a few songs in high school, then gave up his guitar for adult life. He decided about 15 years ago he wanted to make music again and began practicing two hours every day. Lyrics poured from him. He particularly liked writing songs that took him back to his childhood in southwestern Colorado ranch country.

”So you want to be a cowboy, I’ll tell you what to do. Go and live out on the prairie where the sky is always blue.”

Doug didn’t have the confidence to write music for his lyrics. Instead, he paid $100 per song for professionals in Nashville to establish his melodies. His songs came back to him on demos with tunes and voices he didn’t recognize.

Joyce, Doug’s wife of 40 years, didn’t like those renditions of his songs.

“When he sings his own songs, they mean what he wants them to mean,” she says.

Doug sent the demos to publishing companies. One song, “Somethin’ On Your Mind,” made it onto a mix of music sent to 200 radio stations. Doug hasn’t heard it on the air. He compiled the other demos onto two CDs, “Fishing For” and “Glad You Crossed My Path,” with help from Coeur d’Alene musician and computer wizard Gary Edwards.

Gary taught Doug some music basics which gave Doug enough confidence to try writing some melodies for his lyrics. Just as Doug started, Sam Norton, an 88-year-old retired cowboy in Coeur d’Alene, shared with him a poem he wrote one night at 3 a.m. It was long and didn’t rhyme, but Doug liked the story.

“I liked the cowboy stuff,” he says. “It’s a lot of stuff I did as a kid.”

Doug shortened Sam’s poem, added rhymes, changed the title and gave it a melody. He recorded it at One Horse Studio in Hayden Lake. Musician Buck Storm arranged the music. Sam was astonished when he heard Doug singing his song on Doug’s new CD, “Reflections and Recollections.”

“You can understand the words. It ain’t just a bunch of holler,” Sam says appreciatively. “I thought it was the greatest song ever. I couldn’t a made it like this in 100,000 years.”

“Hundred a Month and Found,” the song’s title, refers to a cowboy’s salary with room and board.

“He walked out from town, kicking dirt and sand. The ad in the paper said, ‘Wanted ranch hand.’ Boss said he’d put him in, let him help us brand.”

Doug and Gary combined efforts on “Coeur d’Alene Waltz,” but the other 16 songs on the CD belong entirely to Doug. Joyce loves hearing her silver-haired husband sing.

“He can write a song in 15 minutes,” she marvels.

He’s written nearly 500 songs, but most have no music yet.

That’s ahead. Doug has fans at the Post Falls Senior Center, where he occasionally sings, and at the Cloverleaf Grange, where he leads an open microphone night twice a month.

Sam has sold “Reflections and Recollections” to friends in Texas and Nebraska.

Doug has sold about 50 of the hundreds of CDs stacked in his living room closet.

He hasn’t tried yet to interest local stores in carrying his work. He’s too busy composing.

“If a person treats it as a hobby, they don’t get too disappointed if things don’t work,” he says. “I’m having fun.”