It was way back on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1936 when young Buck Page grabbed a guitar and started his ride into western music history.  He was only thirteen at the time, working long days to help family make ends meet during the Great Depression.  In addition to running the family farm, he found that he could bring in extra money with his guitar.  Within a few months, Buck named a band that he founded, The Riders of the Purple Sage, named after the famous Zane Grey western novel with the blessings of the Grey family.  Soon the Riders relocated to New York City and had a regular gig on national radio.  This began their longstanding reputation in the annals of western music history.  This historic troupe is composed of founder, Buck Page, Mike Ley, Dart Zubis and Cody Bryant.  Who would have guessed in those days that Buck Page would still be crooning cowboy songs at the dawn of the twenty-first century!  The band’s youngest member, Cody Bryant, 40,  of Burbank, California, son of a square dance caller, comments that their music is sentimental, “It’s what I listened to as a child when everything was wonderful...a lot of the old square dance music is derived from western music.” 

Since 1936, Buck Page and his band have been playing the music of ranch hands.  Well known for their hit, “Ghost Riders in the Sky, Mr. Page is the only remaining original  of the group, who is quick to make a distinction about his music.  “You’re either country or you’re western.  We’re western.  We sing about the Grand Canyon, cows and girlfriends back home.  We don’t sing about the girl at the corner bar.  We don’t cry in our beer, in other words.”  Instead, Page’s music is the kind cowboys played to relax their cattle at night so they wouldn’t brak loose and stampede, clarifying, “You wnat them to stay in one place.  There’s always an outlaw and they won’t lay down.  The music soothes them,” says Page, who was raised and worked on a cattle ranch in Lost Cabin, Wyoming.  Although most of the western music legends have ridden into the sunset, Buck Page is still on the scene doing what he loves to do best, singing the western songs that he and others grew up with while entertaining people around the world.  Like the great cowboy entertainers of old, Buck still loves to croon all night and play his arch-top guitar up one side and down the other for the enjoyment of his loyal following of western music fans.  His tunes carry you way back to campfires and cowboy movies of the 1940s and 1950s, when as he shares, “Every little boy wanted to be Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, and every little girl wanted to be Dale Evans.” 

In the 1930s and ‘40s, a professional songwriter would compose a tune, and over time, several groups would perform it, each version increasing the song’s popularity.  Page and a trail of Riders have notched about a dozen million-selling hits with their renditions, including a few of their chart-toppers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Don’t Fence Me In,” “No One to Cry To” and “Cool Water.”  Long before Rod Stewart did his version of “Have I Told You Lately (that I Love You),”  Buck Page and the Riders fo the Purple Sage were singing it to an earlier generation!  Throughout the years, may groups have emulated the Riders; Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead slipped one word into the title and formed a western-rock group, The New Riders of the Purple Sage.  When Buck Page asked Jerry Garcia, “How come you ripped my name off?” Garcia replied, “We thought you guys were dead.”  Page went on to give several concerts with Garcia’s band.  Buck Page, who will turn 79 this spring, said that he plays about 150 gigs a year and has just released his fourth CD last December, entitled, “Twenty-Sevne Greatest hits Live” on WagonWheel Records.  It captures the hong heritage of musical excellence that is, due uniquely to The Riders of the Purple Sage, an American Music Tradition.  “Every time I do a show,  I think, “Hey, I should still keep playing,’” Page comments. 

Moreover, Buck Page has spent many years as a first call Los Angeles studio musician, lending his muscal talents on guitar and bass to countless television shows, over 200 appearances in movies, playing with his band in dozens of campfire scenes in historic cowboy films, and contributing to numerous movies scores and albums.  Their trademark harmonies and signature playing style area major influence in contemporary country music and popular music genres alike.  The band has been broadcast coast to coast on NBC and ABC, also appearing at countless top line venues. Throughout their illustriously extensive career, they have brought their music to the nation by way of radio, concerts, the silver screen, television and finally, the Internet. It is for these reasons that Buck Page was recently honored by the North America Country Music Association, International Hall of Fame’s prestigious Country/Western Living Legend Award.  In other words, Buck Page is a legend in his own time, the genuine article, worthy of distinguished honor by Los Angeles Music Week.