By Scott Rochat
rochat@emporiagazette.com
Chuck Cowan found himself with a fired-up audience on his hands Wednesday.
Toes tapped, hands clapped, and some of the younger members of the crowd even got up to dance at one point. And all throughout, his fans kept shouting out requests: “Play ‘Snowbird!’” “Do ‘South of the Border!’” “‘Satin Doll!’”
Yeah, those library concerts can be something else.
“I’m glad to do this Brown Bag concert,” Cowan told the audience with a smile, his Hawaiian shirt almost as loud as the amplifiers set up in the Emporia Public Library. “And this year, they let me take the bag off my head.”
This was a homecoming for Cowan, who started playing guitar while he was growing up in Emporia and never really stopped. He’s toured clubs across the country and in the Far East, cut albums and recorded movie scores, and even accompanied performers such as Sammy Davis Jr. or the New Christy Minstrels.
But it’s still easy for him to remain a little in awe of the folks he’s played with or to tease himself about a musical career that’s lasted far longer than he would have guessed.
“I’ve tried to quit, but it’s just like drugs,” Cowan grinned. He once tried to hang it up for a more “normal” career in San Francisco, he said, only to run into an old drummer friend. The two began playing so many gigs together that any other job became impossible.
These days, Cowan lives about 26 miles from Fort Scott, a home far enough out in the country that the cell phone service isn’t too reliable. He’s still recording and has a new CD coming out: “At the Lovers’ Lost and Found.”
And he still plays just about anything. Well, maybe not anything: you’re not going to hear punk rock or heavy metal slamming out of his guitar strings. But otherwise, his playlist is pretty eclectic, skipping from classical and folk to jazz and country to oldies like “La Bamba” or “American Pie.”
“I’m a mercenary musician,” Cowan said. “Whatever’s called for, I play it. That’s the only way you can make a living. I know jazz guys who’d starve to death.”
His first big break came while he was a freshman at Emporia State University. He and his band, the Chessmen, were playing their first professional gig — a country club near Branson, Mo. — when an agent spotted them.
“He came up and said, ‘Do you guys want to go on the road?’” Cowan recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh, good Lord, this guy must be deaf.’”
He eventually toured the Midwest, the East Coast, the West Coast, Hawaii, even Southeast Asia and Japan. The Asian portions of the tour were fun but a little rough, he once told a Gazette reporter in 1985.
“I didn’t know where I was half the time and I had jet lag all the time,” he said in the interview. “In Japan we sometimes had six one-hour shows a day in different places. You have to always be moving to make any money at it.”
Well, Hollywood can help a little, too. For a while, Cowan found himself playing on a number of movie scores such as “Hell’s Belles” and “Blood Sabbath.”
One of the more unusual turns in his career came when he was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. It proved to be a surprising event for Cowan and for the Hall.
“I’d never heard of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame,” he said. “And they thought I was dead!”
Far from it. He still gets around to Kansas City, Virginia Beach, Fort Collins, Colo., even to Emporia every so often. And he’s far from forgotten on his home ground — after the library’s lunchtime concert, old friends, longtime fans and former bandmates crowded around to say hi.
Then again, the concert itself could almost be seen as one long conversation between friends as well. A very rhythmic one.
“Thank you very much,” Cowan called out during the Brown Bag as his fingers started to dance again. “When in doubt, play a blues, right?”
• “At the Lovers’ Lost and Found” can be purchased for $15 plus $2 shipping by calling (620) 743-3012 or writing to Box 46, Mapleton, KS 66754.