Album Notes

DONNA DUFRESNE: COWBOY ROMANCE

You may wonder how an album such as this could have been generated by someone who has always lived in New England, but cowboys have followed me in my dreams all my life. The music I write is rooted in the cowboy songs my dad sang to me when I was a child in the 1950’s, and the music of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams which my mother always had blaring on the radio until I went through the rebellious stage of adolescence in the 1960’s and switched over to classical music just because I knew it would drive my parents wild. Years of singing show tunes, jazz, swing and folk music brought me full circle back to my yearning and romance for the wide open spaces and the telling of a good story embellished by a yodel or two. This album is truly “Americana”, influenced by country, swing, jazz, folk, blues, and the Spanish tones of the borderlands. Even the Tango somehow wielded its way into that Mexican Cantina in my head where I sit and write about the characters that pass through â€" like the girl from the imaginary “Blue Parrot Inn” who sings “Fool for Love”, or the lonely Mexican girl waiting for her cowboy to return in “Blue Moon Over Texas”. I hope the songs on this album will carry you away to a simpler time of Saturday matinee’s and the roots of the American Dream and may you always ride beneath that “Forever Moon”.

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I have been making up songs since I was about 12 years old, when I would run through the woods behind my house singing show tunes and yodeling. Drawing upon the rich tones of my childhood, that music would well up from inside me as though Judy Garland and Patsy Cline had struck up a musical chord with Nat King Cole and Cole Porter, while Johnny Cash strummed his train-ride beat in the background. That’s how my life-long songwriting habit was born: running through bean fields and hayfields, pretending to be a composite of all my musical heroes.
Those childhood songs were also inspired by my father, who would play cowboy music with his guitar and harmonica, and now, almost40 years later, I have returned to my musical roots writing cowboy swing and ballads that sound more like they were found in a Texas border archive than derived by a modern songwriter.
Although I continue to write across many genres within the folk/roots scene, it is my ongoing romance with early western swing and south-of-the-border tunes that gives me the biggest thrill as a writer. That’s why I’m having so much fun with my latest back-up trio THE GYPSY COWBOYS and my new CD, COWBOY ROMANCE, produced by Mark Thayer from Signature Sound.

Songwriting is basically storytelling, and I love telling a good story that will touch the heart and the soul. My greatest compliment is when I have brought an audience to tears or managed to tickle them with political satire. Lately, I’ve been into inspiring romance with my little cowboy love songs that just make you want to get up and dance close with someone you adore. I like to dance lightly across the endless spectrum of those human emotions. It’s probably the reason I write so many retro songs in so many different styles.