Never Before Heard Chris LeDoux Vocal Track Becomes a New Collaboration With His Son, Ned LeDoux
By Jof Owen
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From Vern Gosdin to Chancey Williams, country music has always held a place in its heart for rodeo songs. Real life cowboys and cowgirls singing songs about their bucks and burns has translated into some of the genre's most authentic and poet moments.
Anyone who's ever tuned into our Holler playlist of the Best Country Rodeo Songs will know that long before Cody Johnson, there was Chris Ledoux. In songs like 'This Cowboy's Hat' and 'Copenhagen' he recounted the highs and lows of his life as world champion bareback rider and left a legacy of rodeo songs unmatched since.
It's a legacy that's been passed down to his son, Ned LeDoux, the drummer in his dad’s band Western Underground until Chris’s passing in 2005. After his father's death, Ned stepped out from behind the drums, picked up a guitar and took centre stage. Now with three albums and thousand shows behind him, the pair are reunited on the posthumous duet 'One Hand in the Riggin'' with Chris LeDoux singing alongside his son courtesy of a never before heard vocal track.
'One Hand In The Riggin’' was the last song the elder LeDoux ever recorded and the first release by Ned since 2022’s Buckskin, and it was thanks to a bit of a serendipity that the collaboration between both generations of LeDoux men came about.
“In 2003, one of the song’s writers, Brenn Hill, was working on a new album and asked dad to sing on this song with him,” Ned explains. “Due to unforeseen circumstances, it didn’t end up on the record. Twenty-one years later, I ran into Brenn at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and he reminded me that he still had that vocal track - and that God had a better path for it.”
The timing couldn’t have been better as Ned LeDoux was just getting started recording his next album with producer Mac McAnally.
“Mac dropped dad’s vocal in while I was out on tour,” recalls Ned LeDoux. “So, the first time I heard it, Dad and I were singing together. Man, it gave me chills.”
“If I keep one hand in the riggin’ and one hand on the wheel / No matter how far down the road I go, there’s always one more rodeo," they sing, as the driving strums of the song carry lonesome road song and cowboy country tune from verse to verse with Ned and Chris splitting vocal duties until they join together for the song’s defiantly jubilant choruses. "She’d like for me to settle down / As long as I’m still livin’, I keep one hand on the wheel and one hand in the riggin.’”
“It’s just a very special song for me,” says Ned.
'One Hand in the Riggin'' by Ned and Chris LeDoux is out now on Powder River Records through Thirty Tigers with more music from Ned due in early 2025.
