"Gardner and Rideout sound almost too authentic....It's like you're listening not to real singers but to a couple of down-on-their-luck gunslingers in some one-horse town."
                                                                                                       -- Dirty Linen Magazine


From "Boatman's Dance" to "Little Joe, the Wrangler," Mark Gardner and Rex Rideout perform the historic music of the Western experience using vintage instruments and historic playing styles.  As "living historians," they re-create the authentic music of the Santa Fe Trail, the battlefields of the Civil War, the cow camps of the Southwest, and more.  To hear one of their performances is like a trip back to the days of Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and Jack Thorp.  Their "music...is precisely what your ancestors heard, what they danced to," writes Jon Chandler of their popular release, Frontier Favorites: Old Time Music of the Wild West.  "It's a musical journey to the mid-19th century that transcends cultural nostalgia; this music is realistic enough in style and content to have been played and sung in its exact form on the Western frontier....It is rollicking, it is exhilarating, and most of all, it is real." 

Music from Frontier Favorites is featured in two National Park Service visitor center films, those for Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site, La Junta, Colorado; and Fort Union National Monument, Watrous, New Mexico.  Their book and CD of historic cowboy songs, Jack Thorp's Songs of the Cowboys, received the Ralph Emerson Twitchell award from the Historical Society of New Mexico for "significant contribution to the field of history."  Read a web feature on Jack Thorp's Songs of the Cowboys here.

Listen to Mark and Rex perform "The Finger of Billy the Kid" live at the historic Lyceum Theatre, Clovis, New Mexico: