Bruce Anfinson, a cowboy-country singer from Helena, has played music in Germany, Taiwan, Japan and Costa Rica, and a tune he wrote is the theme song for the Montana PBS show “Backroads of Montana.”
He’s played with scores of big-name musicians, jammed with Doc Watson and appeared on “Mountain Stage,” the American Public Radio program broadcast from Charleston, West Virginia.
But he has played in Billings only rarely. He remembers performing at the Northern Hotel and at the Alberta Bair Theater for a Charlie Russell Christmas show, and he recalls being interviewed by T.J. Starr for a segment on Yellowstone Public Radio.
As those memories trickled out, Anfinson asked, “Was there a place called the Granary?” He’s pretty sure he played there, too. “That’s all been quite a while ago, though.”
All of which is to say that if you haven’t heard of Anfinson, don’t feel bad. I myself had never heard him until last summer, when I happened to catch him at the summer-kickoff celebration in Fort Benton. I was hooked and couldn’t wait to hear him again.
That opportunity will present itself Friday night, when he plays a free show at the Yellowstone Valley Brewing Co., 2123 First Ave. N., from 6 to 8 p.m.
He doesn’t travel much anymore. In the summer he stays close to his Last Chance Ranch just north of Helena, where he offers wagon rides, gourmet dinners and live music. In the winter, he works at Lone Mountain Ranch in Big Sky, where as part of a sleigh-ride dinner he drives a team of Belgian draft horses and performs his music.
Anfinson inherited his love of music and horses from his father, Al Anfinson. Al wasn’t a bona fide cowboy, but he was a horseman. When Bruce was growing up in Great Falls the family would travel all over Western Montana on the weekends, so Al could play cowboy polo at various saddle clubs.
Al was also a member of the Montana State Sheriff’s Posse, which meant doing horseback search and rescue for lost hunters, riding in parades and patrolling the fairgrounds on horseback during the state fair.
Al wasn’t a musician, though he liked to pretend he could play the harmonica, but he loved to sing songs by the Sons of the Pioneers, Bob Wills and other cowboy and country entertainers. And when Bruce was 9, his father bought him his first guitar.
In the liner notes to “Handmade Saddle,” Anfinson’s 1999 album, his father, Al, is shown with the saddle that inspired the song.
It wasn’t any old cheap acoustic guitar. It was a solid-body 1956 electric Les Paul guitar. Bruce was soon hooked, and his band was the first one ever to play live at a dance at his junior high school. They had six songs figured out, the idea being that they’d play some songs on a record player, perform their six songs and then fire up the record player again.
“Somehow the record player broke and we ended up playing those six songs, like, six times each,” he said.
That band played the popular music of the time, but eventually Anfinson started playing some of the songs he heard hanging out with his father and assorted “old cowboy characters” who were in the sheriff’s posse. Later on, influenced by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s seminal “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” album, Anfinson started playing bluegrass, too.
His music now is an Americana mixture, though for my money his cowboy-tinged songs are his best. My favorite is “Handmade Saddle,” a true story about a saddle his father made in Great Falls in 1972. He donated it to the sheriff’s posse for a raffle, and it wasn’t until 25 years later that his son started wondering what became of it.
After several years, Anfinson finally found the saddle in Lewistown, and its owner graciously swapped it for another saddle Anfinson had. In his song, Anfinson tells that simple story in a straight-forward but affecting manner, and even if you don’t know which end of a horse to put a feedbag on, it’s liable to bring a tear to your eye.
He brings that same straight-forward delivery to “Home Is Where Montana Is,” the song that became the “Backroads of Montana” theme song. He manages to capture the spirit and the beauty of the place without a drop of sap or treacle.
In another song, “Sweet Montana Home,” Anfinson sings, “The songs I’m used to singin’, they ain’t the kind that the jukebox plays, so I’m headin’ home, to my sweet Montana home.”
The jukeboxes still aren’t playing his kind of music. If you want to hear it, you’ll have to head down to the Yellowstone Valley Brewing Co. on Friday.
