Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Los Gatos resident Jack Sadler now sings and plays the music that entranced him as a child.

Singing cowboy remembers his roots

By Shari Kaplan

Blame it all on his roots--when Jack Sadler shows up in boots, it's sure to be a musical affair.

The love of music--especially traditional western and bluegrass--for the longtime Los Gatan and retired dentist goes back to his Oklahoma boyhood, from which he recalls a somewhat dreamlike incident.

Upon hearing strains of fiddling and square dance music late in the night, a 3-year-old Jack left the bedroom he shared with his three siblings. He slipped out in the dark and walked down the road to the site of a hoedown.

"I should have been in bed, but it was like the Pied Piper. I was totally entranced," he recalls. In 1937, Sadler says, his family joined other "Okies" who loaded up their cars and trekked along Route 66 to California. Whenever they stopped, they ran into other families playing music and singing, much to Sadler's delight.

Living in the Central Valley towns of Tranquillity and Ceres, Sadler spent several years "cotton-pickin' " while reveling in the music so popular in those rural areas.

"I couldn't play a lick, but I was always right in the middle of it," he says of the get-togethers he attended with frequency and relish. Eventually, Sadler picked up a guitar and became a player himself.

Over the years, his musical skills grew and now include fiddle, banjo and harmonica as well as guitar. In his band, Lone Prairie, Sadler's main responsibility is singing (and yodeling) the lead vocals or his share of a three-part harmony. He's also been known to play second fiddle.

Lone Prairie, which cut its debut album, Desert Flower, in 1996, had its genesis at a Santa Cruz barbecue in 1988. Sadler met future bandmates Joe Kimbro and Paul King there, when the three of them spontaneously began singing.

"We realized we all sounded good together, without really working on it," Sadler says. After several years of practicing, collecting a repertoire and adding friends Ed Neff, Barbara Ann Barnett and Karen Quick as additional musicians, Lone Prairie was raring to go.

They now play at Arizona western music festivals and at various California bluegrass festivals, including Hollister and Grass Valley. They've also performed in Salinas during its annual rodeo. His most thrilling moment came in 1994, when he sang "Happy Trails" with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans at the Tucson Western Music Festival.

Before reaching this point in life, however, the singing cowboy needed to put bread on the table for his wife and three children. Combining his interest in both people and dentistry, Sadler obtained his pre-dental and dental degrees and worked in the San Jose area from 1959 through 1990. "There's not a lot of starving dentists, but there are a lot of starving musicians, even some really good ones. I did dentistry for food and money and music for fun," he explains.

"I always had a guitar around, even in dental school. The music was a way to keep me sane," he adds with a grin.

Among various traditional tunes and songs by other artists, the album's namesake song is an original. The words and music came to Sadler as he hiked along a trail near his mountain home. A twangy, romantic cowboy ballad, "Desert Flower" likens a lovely lady to a "floral symphony" of desert blooms.

"I don't call myself a songwriter; I'm just a person who writes songs," he adds with a chuckle and the "aw, shucks" humility that seems only natural for an old-school country boy who scooted his boots from Oklahoma so many years ago.

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