New Mexico singer-songwriter Syd Masters wins WWA Spur Award

Veteran singer-songwriter Syd Masters had known for years that the Western Writers of America presented a Spur Award for Best Western Song.

He just never got around to entering his songs in the competition until this year, when he submitted two cuts off his “Cabin Songs” CD.

New Mexico singer-songwriter Syd Masters wins WWA Spur Award

“I just sent the two songs I thought (Spur judges) would be looking for,” said Masters, a longtime resident of the East Mountains. “They have lyrics that tell a story.”

Sometimes the first time is the charm.

Not only did Masters’ “High Country Trail” win the Spur, but his other entry, “Cowboy Afterlife” took Spur finalist honors.

“I’d been urged to enter, and I’m sure glad I did,” he said.

Tulsa timeWWA, founded in 1953, is a national organization of more than 600 members who write about the West in all kinds of ways — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, books for children, TV and film scripts, and songs.

The organization presents Spurs in 19 different categories, and it’s not necessary to be a WWA member to enter work in the competition.

This year, Jennifer Bohnhoff, who also lives in the East Mountains, took Spur finalist honors in the juvenile novel category for “The Worst Enemy,” the second book in her “Rebels Along the Rio Grande” trilogy.

Last year, Bohnhoff was a Spur finalist in the same category for “Where Duty Calls,” the first book in the trilogy, which is set during the Civil War in New Mexico.

“I’ve written a dozen books and most of them are for middle grade readers and most of them are historical because when I was teaching history, the kids told me it was boring,” Bohnhoff said. “I thought it was important to show that history is exciting if you look at it as more than just dates.”

Spur Awards and Spur finalist certificates will be presented during the WWA Convention, June 19-22 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Also during the convention, the International Western Music Association, which holds its annual convention in Albuquerque each November, will be presented with WWA’s Lariat Award, presented to an individual or a company that has shown exceptional support for WWA and Western literature.

Cowboy credibility

Masters was born and grew up in Wisconsin, but he has lived in New Mexico long enough to establish his singing-cowboy credentials.

In 2009, his song “Under New Mexico Skies” was named the state’s official cowboy song.

In 2019, his CD, “Sunset on the Rio Grande Revisited,” won the Western Heritage Wrangler Award, presented by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, for Best Western Traditional Album.

And his Spur-winning song, “High Country Trail,” was honored with a New Mexico Music Award for Best Original Western Song.

The song is about a cowboy riding home to his cabin and his woman.

“I wrote that song when I was in the Pecos Wilderness in February 2022,” Masters said. “I was staying in a remote cabin, cut off from the world, no TV, nothing. I was looking at the Santa Fe National Forest through a picture window.

“This cowboy gets back to his cabin and his gal once a week or every two weeks. It was not difficult for me to imagine, because I am always out on the road and then getting back home where I like to be, where you are most comfortable and where you are happiest.”

The Spur finalist song, “Cowboy Afterlife,” is about a more independent sort of cowboy, one who doesn’t want a woman’s brand on him, who is just content doing cowboy work.

“He likes the hard life of being a cowboy,” Masters said. “It’s not about making money. As he gets closer to the afterlife, he’d just be happy if it ends up like that.

“If I go to heaven and end up working on a ranch as a cowboy and sitting around and singing a few songs, that’d be fine with me. That’s what that song is all about.”

‘Just ran me over’

Masters has been writing some new songs, but he figures it will be 2025 before he gets another CD recorded. He stays plenty busy performing music.

“I have 76 dates booked the rest of the year and will probably book some more around Christmas,” he said.

A standing gig for about 15 years is Cowboy Evenings at Bobcat Pass Wilderness Adventures in Red River, from the middle of June to Labor Day weekend.

Masters intends to move from the East Mountains to Red River permanently later this year, but in the past he has stayed in his camper-trailer at the top of Bobcat Pass near Red River when performing up that way. That led to “From Bobcat to Cimarron,” a very funny track on the “Cabin Songs” CD.

It started with a noisy flatbed truck waking Masters in his camper-trailer one night.

“I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I started writing this song,” Masters said. “I don’t know what kind of truck that was, but it’s a Chevy in my song because that’s the rhyme I needed.”

The song is about two cowboys in a truck pulling a horse trailer up an incline when the brake line gets severed, and they start a backward plunge from Bobcat Pass through all sorts of twists and turns and hazards all the way to the rodeo grounds in Cimarron.

“I got going on it and thought, ‘Hey, this is fun. How am I going to fit all the words in it? I got to keep it going. No guitar solos.’ Sometimes you get an idea for a song, and it takes a month or two months to get it down. But on this one, I wasn’t going to quit until I wrote it all down. This was one that just ran me over. I couldn’t get out of the way of it.”

Going traditional

Bohnhoff, 65, was born in Las Cruces, but moved 14 times during her childhood because her father was in the Army.

The family had settled back in New Mexico by the time she was in the eighth grade, however, and she graduated from Manzano High School.

She was a teacher for 15 years, instructing kids in English and history at the high school and middle school levels with Albuquerque Public Schools before moving to the East Mountains and joining the faculty at Edgewood Middle School.

“In 1992, I started writing with the intention of getting published, and by 2014 I had hit rejection one thousand,” she said. “I decided to self-publish before I died of old age.”

Bohnhoff’s true love is historical fiction, but her own output has been diverse — fantasy, humor, fiction that ranges in setting from 13th-century England to Civil War Pennsylvania to World War II Normandy.

She was inspired to start the “Rebels on the Rio Grande” series by a textbook that devoted just a page and a half to the Civil War in New Mexico.

“The New Mexico campaign was small, but it was really important,” she said. “If (Confederate Gen. Henry Hopkins) Sibley had succeeded in capturing the Colorado and Californian gold fields and California’s deep-water ports, the world might have been a different place.”

The trilogy features three young men caught up in the conflict, a Texan on the Confederate side, and a Hispanic and an Irish immigrant in the Union ranks.

“They all have hearts and they all have struggles,” Bohnhoff said of her young characters.

The series concludes with “The Famished Country,” scheduled for publication this year.

Now, she’s trying to finish up what she considers her first traditional Western.

“It’s set in the 1880s in New Mexico and it’s got a cowboy and a woman who needs his help.”