(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

The nasal-voiced singer Syd Griffin (born in Kentucky) and his Long Ryders were among the protagonists of the brief “cow-punk” phenomenon in Los Angeles.

They debuted with the EP 10-5-60 (PVC, 1983), featuring garage-style folk-rock marked by scorching guitar “walls of sound” (And She Rides), but they made their mark with Native Sons (Frontier, 1984), establishing themselves as standard-bearers of country instrumentation in classic tales of prisons, trains, farms, and truckers, propelled by frenzied rhythm and blues (Tell It To The Judge), rock and roll (Run Dusty Run, I Had A Dream), bluegrass (Never Got To Meet The Mom), hoedown (Final Wild Son), and Paisley-style folk-rock arrangements (Too Close To The Light), excelling in the fatal/epic register of Still Get By, which would later define Looking For Lewis And Clark on State Of Our Union (Island, 1985).

The mature style of Two Fisted Tales (Island, 1987) reveals the truth about their country-rock: sincere populism and Christian fervor in the spirit of Gram Parsons. This World Is Not My Home (Geffen, 1997) is an anthology of previously unreleased or rare material.

The Long Ryders revitalized country-rock by reconnecting directly with the wildest honky-tonk of the immediate postwar period and, at the edge, with the “Dust Bowl” folk of the Depression. Their songs adhere to the most classic principles of rock composition, as articulated by Chuck Berry and Berry Gordy: every track must have a beginning, middle, and end, present stock characters, and tell a story.

But Los London (Prima, 1995) marks, again, a return to the Long Ryders and their jangling country-rock (It Happened To Me, Chasing Rainbows, Crackin' At The Seams).