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Sourdough Slim From Out West #30 By Chuck Woodbury Sourdough Slim is an accordion-playing, yodeling cowboy with goofy grin. Last year he followed his dream all the way to Carnegie Hall where he yodeled his comic cowboy heart out to a packed house of smiling New Yorkers. As he stood upon that Mother of All Stages, he knew that he had achieved his American Dream. He's 44 years old, from Paradise, Calif., and he sings songs of yesteryear popularized by movie cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Between songs he tells jokes so bad they're funny. Besides the accordion, he plays guitar and harmonica. His real name is Rick Crowder.
Back in the '70s, he was working for an Oregon logging company. One day, in a thrift shop, his life changed forever. Like Clark Kent entering a phone booth, Rick Crowder entered the store as one man but emerged as another. "I walked in that store with a picture of a '30s cowboy in my hand," he recalled. " I put on some wool pleated pants, a checkered two pocket cotton shirt, a scarf, and cowboy boots, and I tucked my pants into the boots, and then I looked into a mirror. Wow!" It was Sourdough Slim. But only for the moment. He was still Rick Crowder, a hard working guy who, in his 20s and 30s, sang part-time in local bands in nearby Chico, dreaming of something better. He earned a living, but he knew he was headed nowhere. "There's no security in being in a band," he said. "The band can always break up." In 1988, while employed as a loader for United Parcel Service in Chico, Crowder decided it was time for a change. It was time for Sourdough Slim. It was a terrifying thought. Just thinking about leaving the security of his job caused his stomach to churn and his chest to ache. "I was violently ill," he remembers. He saw his doctor. He asked, "Would you write a letter to my boss saying I'm too sick to work and I need three month's rest?" The doctor did. Crowder figured he could use the three months to give Sourdough Slim a test drive, and if it didn't work out, his old job would be waiting. "Can't do it," said his bosses. So Crowder quit. And he went home, and he put on his pleated pants and his checkered two-pocket shirt, and his boots and his ten gallon cowboy hat, and he tucked his pleated pants into his boots, and then he strapped on his accordion. And then, he took a deep breath, and he went "gulp." And then he yodeled. Goodbye UPS. Hello Sourdough! Rick Crowder taught himself to yodel long before Sourdough Slim came along. "I was living in Oregon," he recalled. "I'd go up to my attic and just start yodeling. I was terrible at first, but I figured nobody could hear me up there. You have to be somewhere where you're not intimidated because you think somebody might be listening." He yodeled and he yodeled and before long he was yodeling like his idol, Jimmy Rogers. He's been Sourdough Slim now full-time for about seven years, performing at state and county fairs, music festivals, night clubs, even on ABC-TVs "Good Morning America" and at Carnegie Hall on a program titled "The Singing Cowboys." He even managed to find time to sing two songs on Out West's Video II. He loves what he does -- the music and the independence. "Everyone would like to be independent," he said, "but there's a huge percentage of people out there who never decide what they really want to do with their lives. They'd like to follow their dream, but they just settle for what they do. Then it's too late. "You'll never get anywhere doing a job you don't like. If you do a job you put your heart and soul into, eventually you'll succeed." Rick Crowder remembers when he told his folks about his decision to become Sourdough Slim -- "an accordion playing, yodeling cowboy." "Yeah sure," they said, wondering, perhaps, where they had gone wrong. But Crowder did become Sourdough Slim, and in the process became a contented man. With his wife Rocky and their son Carson, a few years ago he moved from his small home in Chico to a big one in, of all places, Paradise. "Whatever you believe in becomes your reality," he said. In Rick Crowder's case, he ended up a yodeling cowboy in Paradise. Not bad. Visit Sourdough Slim's website. ©2000 by Out West Newspaper
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