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Song of the Week #97
by Bob Nolan

The new paperback edition of America Alone is launched in Canada today, and it seems appropriate to mark the occasion with an all-Canuck Song of the Week. So here's one of the biggest hits ever to come out of Winnipeg:  

See them tumbling down
Pledging their love to the ground
Lonely but free I'll be found
Drifting along with the Tumbling Tumbleweeds...

Hang on, that doesn't sound very Winnipeg-like. What have "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" got to do with Manitoba? Well, the guy who wrote it was born there: Bob Nolan. And, following eden ahbez (Song of the Week #95), Frank Perkins (#96), Lionel Hampton and Bernie Hanighen (#97), Mr Nolan continues our run of songwriter centenaries: He was born in the 'Peg in April 1908. The spring of '08 was quite a quarter for one- and two-hit songwriters. We'll come to the second of Nolan's brace of hits later, but "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" was the song that defined his life. Like the tumbleweeds, he drifted hither and yon. Born Clarence Robert Nobles, he spent his early years wandering across Canada as his parents looked for work. When he was seven, they separated, and young Clarence went to live on his grandparents' homestead in New Brunswick. His father ducked out of sight, joined the US Army and emerged with the name "Harry Nolan". Clarence's aunt took him and his brother to Boston, and at the age of 13 the boys joined their dad in Tucson, Arizona and "Clarence Robert Nobles" became "Bob Nolan".

He loved the southwestern desert, the peace and isolation. But he needed work and he roamed far and wide. He hopped freights and he wrote a train song - "Way Out There" - and he married and had a daughter, but drifted on again. And in the early Thirties he was working in Los Angeles as a golf caddy when he got another idea for a song - this time about tumbling ...leaves. Well, come on. He was working at a golf club in Los Angeles: you don't see a lot of tumbleweeds blowing across the 18th hole but you do get leaves. Eventually he decided to leave the leaves, and write what was really on his mind:

I'm a roaming cowboy riding all day long
Tumbleweeds around me sing their lonely song
Nights underneath the prairie moon
I ride along and sing this tune...

Around this time Nolan saw an advertisement for a yodeler and decided to apply. He wound up in a group called the Rocky Mountaineers, and a couple of years later - 1934 - one of his fellow yodeling Mountaineers, Leonard Slye, persuaded him to join a new group, the Sons of the Pioneers. Nolan's pal had ambitions to be a singing cowboy, and, figuring "Leonard Slye" sounded more like one of the black-hat crowd, changed his name to Roy Rogers. Which is how a boy from Winnipeg via the Maritimes wound up a member of one of America's most popular western vocal groups. They needed a big song, and Bob Nolan had one of the all-time great cowboy ballads ready to go:

Cares of the past are behind
Nowhere to go but I'll find
Just where the trail will wind
Drifting along with the Tumbling Tumbleweeds... 

Within a year it was the title of a Gene Autry movie, and all these years later, notwithstanding versions by Michael Nesmith and even Diana Ross and the Supremes, it's still Autry's version I hear in my head when I think of the song. "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" is the simplest of western ballads, without much in the way of melodic or harmonic interest. But from the big fat note that opens the chorus it lopes along as naturally as any cowboy riding the trail and it has a great central image, one that Bob Nolan helped make an instantly recognizable shorthand in westerns and on TV for desolation, the abandonment of a community and its return to nature. I doubt many of us, when we see a tumbleweed blow down Main Street in the old west, connect the iconography with a boy from Winnipeg. But, on the other hand, the tumbling weed itself is even less American. It was unknown in the United States until 1877, when it was observed in Bon Homme County, South Dakota, having apparently entered the country in sacks of flax seed imported from the old country by Ukrainian immigrant farmers. Tumbleweed grows in flat dry soil, and in the autumn it breaks away from its roots and gets blown around as a light rolling blob. Match a Ukrainian weed to a Canadian songwriter and you've got an all-American anthem.

Not that Bob Nolan ever made much money from "Tumbling Tumbleweeds". The Sons of the Pioneers signed immensely foolish deals that lost them performance royalties, and Nolan's agent skipped town with a big bunch of his songwriting earnings and much else. But he stayed a Pioneer till 1949, and he acted in 88 B westerns, writing the scores for over a dozen of them. None of the songs did much after "Tumbleweeds", except for "Cool Water" in 1941, which gave Nolan the second smash of his career. Eight years later, the songwriter who'd tumbled to tumbleweeds uprooted himself and blew out of town, living alone for months at a time in a cabin up at Big Bear Lake. He died in 1980, after three decades as a semi-recluse, and his ashes were scattered, like the tumbleweeds, over the Nevada desert he loved.

Bob Nolan, son of Winnipeg and Son of the Pioneers, gave the west two of its most enduring cowboy ballads, even if one of them was born while he was a golf caddy in Los Angeles. Incidentally, years after the writer's death, The Big Lebowski opened with a tumbleweed rolling right into Los Angeles accompanied by Nolan's great song: