Joni Harms

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #119 (August/September 2005).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Joni Harms

Putting the Western Back in Country

by Kerry Dexter

Joni Harms remembers why she fell in love with the guitar, in preference to the piano on which she'd been taking lessons. "I could take it out to the barn with my horse," she recalled. Harms was about 12 years old when she made this connection between the two things she loved, and still loves: music and the Western way of life. That connection and her search for a way to make a career of it has taken her through stints as a rodeo queen, signings with a series of Nashville record labels to performing in venues from rodeo arenas to the Grand Ole Opry to clubs in the U.K. and France. She has co-written with some of country music's top tunesmiths, releasing independent records on her own, building sponsor agreements with Wrangler and other Western-themed companies, and winning awards for her Western-style music and writing. Through all that she's become a wife and mother and remained a rancher, living on property that has been in her family for a hundred years. "It's about 40 miles south of Portland, Oregon," she said, "and we raise cattle, horses, and Christmas trees."

She also raises quite a lot of music, playing about 150 dates on the road each year. Music is as much a part of her personal history as ranching. "My family has always been really musical," she said. "There was always music goin' on, as long as I can remember, with my father or mother playing, and my brother and sister, who are 10 and 11 years older than I am, so they were playing music when I was just a toddler. It certainly wasn't just homemade music, either," Harms continued. "There was always the radio on, the 'Grand Ole Opry' you'd hear on weekends on the radio, some television shows, too -- I just couldn't ever imagine life without it." It's a tradition that's continuing. "It is still that way today. My children have music on all the time," she said, laughing. "We have radios out in the barn; we have music all over."

It wasn't just listening to music that intrigued Harms as a child; she wanted to create it, too. "I knew at a really early age that that's what I wanted to do," she said. "We went to a lot of rodeos, and I remember when I was four or five years old, singing 'I Want to be a Cowboy's Sweet Heart' and 'Ragtime Cowboy Joe' for the cowboys back then. So I had the bug at an early age."

[cover #119]