Someday Soon

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Someday Soon

Written by Ian Tyson, 1963

Before he was a folk singer, Ian Tyson was a rodeo rider. He grew up on a farm in British Columbia, learned to ride young, and spent his late teens and early twenties on the rodeo circuit, until an injury ended that career in his mid-twenties. While he was laid up in the hospital, he picked up a guitar to pass the time. It turned out to be a good trade.

By the early 1960s, Ian had teamed up with Sylvia Fricker as the Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia, and they were making their name in New York. Ian later said that Bob Dylan’s example pushed them to start writing their own songs, and once he began, he realized he had a whole store of cowboy material from his own life that he’d never thought of as folk music. He wrote “Someday Soon” in Sylvia’s apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The curious thing is that he wrote it from a young woman’s point of view. She loves a rodeo cowboy who is always off on the circuit, and her family doesn’t approve of him one bit. Ian admitted he never knew where the idea came from. He said he borrowed the opening line from an old Stanley Brothers bluegrass song, “but I don’t know where I got that plotline.”

Ian & Sylvia first released the song in January 1964, tucked away as the B-side of their single “You Were on My Mind.” It appeared that same year on their album Northern Journey, released shortly after the two were married in June 1964.

The song found its wider audience a few years later, thanks to a bit of romance. In 1968, Judy Collins was recording her album Who Knows Where the Time Goes in Los Angeles, and she was seeing Stephen Stills at the time. As Judy tells it, the two were driving back from Malibu one evening when Stills said the album needed one more song and suggested “Someday Soon.” She loved the idea, calling herself “a Colorado girl at heart,” since the cowboy in the song hails from Colorado. She remembered all the words, the two sang it in harmony on the freeway, and they recorded it the very next day, with Stills on acoustic guitar, Buddy Emmons on pedal steel, and James Burton on electric guitar. Ian Tyson remembered the story a little differently. He said Judy didn’t want to record it at first, but Stills pushed her, and the result was “magical.” Stills, of course, went on to write “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” about her.

Released as a single in January 1969, Judy’s version climbed only to No. 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 37 in Canada, though it reached the Top Ten in San Francisco and several other California cities. The modest national numbers never mattered much. It became one of her signature songs, and she has kept singing it for decades, including a 2015 duet version with Jimmy Buffett.

Country singers took to it too. Moe Bandy’s 1982 recording reached No. 21 on the country charts. Then in 1991, Suzy Bogguss, who had been singing it since she started performing in 1978, had to talk her producer into letting her record it. He worried too many people had already covered it. She won that argument, and her version rose to No. 12 on the country charts, following Judy Collins’s arrangement closely. Over the years the song has also been recorded by the Kingston Trio, Lynn Anderson, Glen Campbell, Tanya Tucker, Crystal Gayle, and many others.

In 2010, the Western Writers of America named “Someday Soon” one of the Top 100 Western Songs of all time. That was a fitting honor for a song written by a man who had actually lived the rodeo life he sang about.