Frosted Horses

A song from a cold winter's night on the high desert of Nevada

Dec 11, 2024

Manning and Badger on our place in Starr Valley, Nevada

Today, I’d like to introduce a song from my upcoming album Cowboy Sutra. It came to me many years ago and is the only song in the cycle I wrote front to back, melody to lyrics. I’ve sung it in many places. The most memorable was at a high school in Turkmenistan where a local man played a herding song on a long wooden flute from his tradition. Then it was my turn, and I sang “Frosted Horses” with my banjo. After that, the songs started flowing with my good cowboy friends Andy Hedges, Gail Steiger. and Linda Svendsen adding their glorious music to the mix.

“Frosted Horses” recording

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Hal Cannon, Linda Svendsen, Gail Steiger & Andy Hedges, 2013, Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, photo by Candra Day, Vista360

Sometimes a guy just can’t sleep.

… and that was the case this night, so long ago. I lay in bed listening to the silence of the night when a sudden wind came blowing in from the south. I must have dozed off because when I woke again, it was dead calm. I can’t explain just what got me out of bed – some sort of strange anticipation. But now I was up, headed for the big window in the living room. I peered out into the dark, but there was nothing to see on this moonless night. Still, I sensed something –it wasn’t danger, but something was calling that was mysterious and undefinable. The night had been a bitter cold and earlier a damp fog had crept up from the bottom country where the Humbolt River meandered a few miles north of our home in a 40-acre meadow on the edge of the East Humbolt Mountains in northeast Nevada.

It's then that Teresa stepped up to me, rubbing her eyes. Something called her to the window, too. Embers still glowed in our heavy brick fireplace, and the house was toasty warm. Yet, the freezing night, for reasons neither of us tried to articulate, called to us. We wordlessly slipped into heavy insulated overalls, parkas, gloves, and hats, and stepped onto the porch.

Once outside, the massive sky made us dizzy. The fog had broken, and we looked up into a universe filled with stars. We were miles away from a city or other source of light, and we gazed up into a miracle. Just beyond our front yard stood a pole fence that separated our yard from the meadow ground. Glowing inky blue near the fence stood our two horses, Badger and Manning, leaning into each other the way sleeping horses stand when it’s very cold. Horses are prey animals and they sleep standing up. They have to be being ready to run in an eye blink to escape a marauding mountain lion or wolf. But this night, they could have been statues. They had thick winter coats, but still, we thought, they had to feel the cold. Then, as our eyes adjusted to the dark, we realized they were coated with frost left behind by the fog, as was each blade of meadow grass, each willow branch, each of the branches on the cottonwood trees.

My mother called this hoar frost, but here in Nevada. people call this frost that forms directly from fog to ice without melting, pogonip. The word derives from the Shoshone word paγɨnappɨh, which means cloud.

We stood mesmerized as the faintest tint of grey crept up behind the Humboldt peaks in front of us. A wind kicked up and then, all of a sudden, both horses whirled, kicked, shook off the frost, bucked, and took off at a gallop. Teresa and I leaned into each other for warmth, and simply watched in wonder.

This was before you could pull out a phone and take a picture, but the scene burned into my memory. A few years later I wrote the song. Both Badger and Manning are long gone. They spent their retirement years at the Mary’s River Ranch 40 miles north of our Starr Valley meadow, munching retirement hay and kicking up their heels from time to time if pogonip excited them.

A song that paints a picture.

The great Ozark ballad singer Almeda Riddle often said she didn’t care for a song that didn’t tell a story or teach a lesson. Over the years, I’ve written a lot of ballads. My last album, Nothin’ Lastin’, is a collection of those kinds of songs, mostly cautionary tales that teach a lesson/ But that is not the case with “Frosted Horses.” At some point, I tired of writing songs with so many words. I wanted to write something that had the feeling of a haiku, capturing a moment in just a few words. I wanted to write a song that was more visual than verbal. “Frosted Horses” is that sort of song.

The music begins with a harmonium, joined in time by a far-off banjo introducing the theme with harmonica drifting in from the background. A few hints of percussion kick up just like the horses. The banjo and vocal were recorded in one take, improvising on the banjo and singing the simple words to follow where the banjo led me.