As the song opens, we find Lynott crooning softly over gentle guitar chords and a softly sighing harmonica. Take “Cowboy Song,” my personal favorite track from my personal favorite Thin Lizzy album, 1976’s Jailbreak. A handsome man whose sad eyes and sneering lips hinted at the soul of a warrior poet, he brought uncommon sensitivity to the hard rock world of the ’70s and ’80s, proving that even the toughest guys on stage can still have a tender side. When he returned to England over a decade later to properly launch his band, Thin Lizzy, Lynott again faced a double shot of prejudice in a country where “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” signs could still be spotted in local store windows.Īnd yet, in the face of so much opposition, Lynott was indomitable.
At age seven, he was sent to live with his mother’s parents in Crumlin, a southern suburb of Dublin, an area where virtually no other Black people lived.
Born in West Bromwich, United Kingdom, to a white woman from Ireland and a Black man from South America in 1949, he grew up twice derided as a biracial kid raised by a single mother during an intolerant era. When it comes to rock outsiders, few can claim to have the credibility of the late, great Phil Lynott. It’s the posture of the outsider, the non-conformist who rides “lonesome on the trail” as “the howling winds wail,” to quote, hands down, the coolest rock cowboy of all time. In rock ’n’ roll, however, cowboy culture is about not belonging. In that genre, identifying with cowboys is a way of conforming to a rural culture that deifies macho dudes who sport mile-wide hats and epically crusty mustaches.
#Thin lizzy singer movie#
In rock music, “being the cowboy” isn’t like the Western movie ideation that’s common in country music. In the ’80s, Jon Bon Jovi looked out at a sea of faces staring back at him in some far-flung enormodome and imagined himself riding a steel horse from town to town in “Wanted Dead Or Alive.” More recently, the talented indie singer-songwriter Mitski took this “rocker equals cowhand” rhetorical device to another level on her 2018 LP Be the Cowboy, in which she conceived of donning boots and chaps as a path toward empowerment against patriarchal adversaries, like a feminist Fistful of Dollars. In the 1970s, The Eagles made a career out of it, most notably with the outlaw cosplay of their 1973 concept LP, Desperado. There is a rich tradition in rock ’n’ roll of musicians pretending to be cowboys.
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