While competing in rodeo, LeDoux would sell some four million dollars worth of 22 albums he described as encompassing “Western soul, sagebrush blues, cowboy folk and rodeo rock ‘n’ roll,” enough so that when he retired from the rodeo circuit in 1980, he was able to re-focus on performing his music, his energetic, bold live shows making him a Western cult figure.

Al and Chris’s mother Bonnie effectively ran the record company, shipping out to his rodeo fans the tapes of songs he wrote and recorded, songs that reflected the rodeo cowboy life, and promoting him as “The Singin’ Bronc Rider.” Chris married Peggy Rhoads of Kaycee, Wyoming, that same year they would raise five children at their Kaycee home base. In 1972, in part as a way to cover rodeo entry expenses, LeDoux formed the independent country music record label American Cowboy Songs with his dad Al, who was now retired, and relocated to Mt. He would compete in some 80 rodeos a year, and go on to become the world championship of bareback bronc riding in 1976. He was developing his talent as a sculptor in college in Wyoming and New Mexico when he left school to compete riding bareback full-time.

Having learned to ride horses on his grandparents’ Michigan farm, LeDoux focused on competitive rodeo riding as a career by the age of fourteen, and began playing guitar and writing songs as a sideline while in high school in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Young Chris lived here for the first year and a half of his life and for another year at the age of twelve, which yielded the boyhood memories of fishing holes and black-eyed peas reflected in his song “Born in Mississippi.” The military family moved frequently, including a period in Texas. When Garth Brooks, a fan of LeDoux’s exuberant live performing style mentioned him in a 1989 hit, LeDoux became a major label star on Capitol Records himself.īorn on October 2, 1948, here in Biloxi, Chris Lee LeDoux was the son of an Air Force major stationed at Keesler Air Force Base. The 1976 World Champion Bareback Bronc Rider released modern and traditional cowboy song records for his rodeo fans from 1973-1991. Chris LeDoux (1948-2005), the Singing Bronc Rider, pursued dreams of success as both a competitive rodeo cowboy and latter day Western singing star and achieved both.

Garth brooks song about rodeo rider