Chris Ledoux Biography
2 October 1948, Biloxi, Mississippi, USA, d. 9 March 2005, Casper, Wyoming, USA. LeDoux's father was an airforce pilot who was posted to various parts of the USA. His grandfather, who had served in the US cavalry and fought against Pancho Villa, encouraged LeDoux to ride horses on his Wyoming farm. LeDoux attended high school at Cheyenne, Wyoming, and, while still at school, he twice won the state's bareback title. In 1967, after graduating, he won a rodeo scholarship and received a national title in his third year. In 1976, he became the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association's world champion in bareback riding. LeDoux had been playing guitar and harmonica and writing songs since his teens, and he used his musical ability as a means of paying his way from one rodeo to another.
In 1971 LeDoux launched his career as a performer, writing and recording songs about "real cowboys". Although his voice would not win world championships and despite initially struggling to be taken seriously in Nashville, his albums sold strongly on the strength of his loyal following. LeDoux began selling his home-recorded tapes at rodeo events and his early albums were released through his own publishing venture, American Cowboy Songs. They combined his own compositions about rodeo life with old and new cowboy songs, with LeDoux describing his music as "a combination of western soul, sagebrush blues, cowboy folk and rodeo rock 'n' roll". After retiring from rodeos in 1980, LeDoux settled with his family on a ranch in Wyoming and began to devote more time to his recording career. Sales of his albums continued to escalate during the 80s and in 1989 his name was promoted to a wider audience when upcoming new country singer Garth Brooks paid tribute to LeDoux in "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)'. Brooks" testimony, together with the success of a single, "Ridin' For A Fall", brought him to the attention of Liberty Records, who signed LeDoux for new recordings and reissued his earlier work. In 1992 he duetted with Brooks on the title track of Whatcha Gonna Do With A Cowboy. Both the single and the album reached the country Top 10. LeDoux switched to Liberty's parent label Capitol Records in 1995. He continued to release critically and commercially successful albums into the new millennium, and remained a popular entertainer with his band, Western Underground, particularly on the rodeo circuit. In October 2000, after being ill for some time with primary sclerosing cholangitis, he underwent a liver transplant. Further cruel news arrived in late 2004 when LeDoux was diagnosed with cancer of the bile duct, and the singer succumbed to the illness the following March.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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