Two years ago, singer/songwriter Mike Beck started off on a pilgrimage through California’s Central Valley. Beck, a fixture in the local music scene since his appearance in the late ’70s as a founding member of the bluegrass group the Coast Ridge Boys, headed south with two goals in mind: to get legendary country star Buck Owens to sign his guitar, and to catch some country music at Oildale’s legendary Blackboard, a honky tonk where Owens cut his teeth and where George Jones, Merle Haggard and other country legends performed.

Beck easily accomplished the first goal; he found Owens at his Crystal Palace, a Bakersfield landmark that is a combination country music museum, restaurant and venue, 18 months before Owens passed away in March.

His second task proved impossible to accomplish. Where the Blackboard used to stand, there was nothing more than a vacant lot. “I wasn’t as surprised as I was saddened,” Beck says.

Beck’s disappointment at the loss—and at a contemporary Western culture that seems to bury its past in favor of a constantly changing present—is expressed in “Oildale,” from his latest CD Rooted. The superb number sounds like Tom Petty fronting a classic Bakersfield country band as Beck laments that Oildale no longer has a country music scene, while observing that at least the city is “damn near yuppie-free.”

Before the release of the rock and country album Rooted this year, Beck’s past solo releases were Western folk albums that romanticized cowboy culture and the West’s history. On 2001’s Mariposa Wind, the song “Old California” explores what life was like a hundred years ago; meanwhile “Closer to the Light” is culled from Beck’s own experiences as a working cowboy.

Beck became enamored with horseback riding at 9 years old, when he got his first horse, a chestnut mare named Candy. On rides around Monterey’s Josselyn Canyon, Beck discovered a feeling he didn’t get from doing anything else.

“There’s this ancient thing in our fiber: a respect for a man on horseback,” he says. “You feel special. You feel different.”

Before turning 18, Beck was working with horses out at the Hidden Hill Stables in Carmel Valley, where he was taken under the wing of local horsemen Roy Forzoni, Tom Dorrance and Bill Dorance. Later, Beck moved to Nevada’s 2 million-acre Spanish Ranch, where he would spend months at a time camping and rounding up cattle for branding. “It was like a Zen experience,” he says. “It was my Yale and Harvard, man.”

Beck bumped around for years working as a cowboy in Montana and playing music all over, including a few stints in Nashville. Along the way, he became friends with folk icon Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and cowboy singer Ian Tyson. (Beck says Tyson told him his first album, 1990’s Life of a Buckaroo, sounded like “40 miles of rough road.”)

He started teaching horsemanship clinics, where he taught riders to see things from a horse’s point of view. While teaching his students to “observe, remember and compare,” he began to apply his horsemanship teachings to his own songwriting. “It’s the same thing,” he says. “It’s just life. It’s helped me to observe.”

Like other cowboy singer/songwriters, Beck, who has performed at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering around 15 times, hopes his Western folk releases like Mariposa Wind keep cowboy culture alive. “I think it’s such an American thing; it’s a shame it’s fading,” he says.

Rooted is grounded in the present, though it often looks back at the past wistfully. On “Quite Like This,” Beck recalls bringing a young woman down to Big Sur for the first time, while the aforementioned “Oildale” and “John Steinbeck Drank Here” feature a present-day narrator, probably Beck, pondering the historic significance of the barrooms he is sitting in. Meanwhile, “George Orwell’s 113th Dream” and “Amanda Come Home” confront current political realities. “Amanda Come Home,” a song about a DLI student who was recently sent to Iraq, was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition this past August.

It’s not just the lyrics that are different from Beck’s past albums. On Rooted, the music is clearly influenced by a mix of classic country and rock artists. “I’m a product of the ‘60s,” Beck says. “I grew up in California being influenced by Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds and Buck Owens.”

Whether the cowboy crowd will embrace Beck’s new direction is up in the air, but the truth of the matter is that they’re fighting for the same thing: to keep the West’s past alive. It’s just that Beck hopes to preserve California’s newer traditions along with its Old West culture. “It’s a land where anything can happen,” Beck says. “It’s also the land that shits on its history.”  

MIKE BECK plays the Monterey Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival on Saturday at 9am with Red Steagall and Yvonne Hollenbeck and on Sunday at 11am with Dave Stamey and Jim Ross at the Marriott Hotel, 350 Calle Principal, Monterey. $15/ Saturday 9am show and Sunday 11am show; $190/ all event pass. 1-800-722-9652.