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Angling Around Sun Valley with Mike McKenna
Calling All Deadheads: Valenzuela and Friends Revive the Grateful Dead This Week Page 11
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read about it on PaGe 5
Saddle Up!
J u l y 3 1 , 2 0 1 3 • V o l . 6 • N o . 3 1 • w w w .T h e W e e k l y S u n . c o m
With Saddlemaker Jack Sept
COURTESY PHOTO
Korby Lenker Concert to Raise Money for Local Scholarships
“When I was 4, my uncle set a new saddle on the arm of the couch…it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
BY KAREN BOSSICK
A
s the son of a Twin Falls mortician, nothing is off limits for Korby Lenker. That’s why when he read a book about snake handling, nothing would do but for him to drive until he found one of the mountain churches mentioned in “Salvation on Sand Mountain.” Inspired, he returned to the Pacific Northwest and formed a bluegrass band called The Barbed Wire Cutters. And he wrote a song about the snake-handling preacher he met in the Appalachian Mountains. Lenker’s penchant for the unusual has served him well. Not only was he selected as one of 10 finalists out of 500 in the Telluride Bluegrass Festival Troubadour Contest, but he’s opened for the likes of Willie Nelson, Nickel Creek, Keith Urban and Susan Tedeschi. “It should be no surprise that the son of a mortician would make music with an appreciation for the absurd,” he told a reporter for “American Songwriter Magazine.” “I remember lots of times as a little kid waiting in the embalming room for my dad to finish filling someone with formaldehyde so we could go to the park and eat KFC.” Lenker, who now lives in Nashville, will bring his eclectic musical morsels to Velocio in Ketchum at 7 p.m. Monday. Admission is $20 with a portion of the proceeds going to a new performing arts scholarship for Wood River High School students. Velocio will also provide food and drink specials with a portion of those proceeds going toward the scholarship. “Recently, the Blaine County School District was recognized by the National Association of Music Merchants as one of 307 districts across the country with an outstanding commitment to music education. Yet, we don’t have a scholarship earmarked for performing arts students,” said KECH Radio News Director Dayle Ohlau. “I’m hoping if we get enough people attending this concert we can give away two $1,000 Korby Lenker/ Rich Broadcasting Performing Arts Scholarships to graduating seniors who plan to pursue a degree in music or the performing arts.” Ohlau said the inspiration for the Korby Lenker concert came from an Elkhorn concert she and her son saw a couple years ago featuring Josh Ritter. “We had the best time and a friend of mine whom I used to do TV with in Michigan said, ‘If you loved Josh Ritter, you’ll love Korby Lenker. And it’s
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–Jack Sept STORY & PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
Y
ou need only follow your nose to Jack Sept’s saddlemaking workshop, which sits above the garage of his home south of Bellevue. The smell of tanned leather is pervasive as you climb past bridles and harnesses, past coyote traps, past his father’s handmade vintage cowboy boots into a workshop that looks like a page out of “American Cowboy Magazine.” Dressed in his Cheyenne Frontier Days denim shirt and handmade cowboy boots, Sept fits right in amidst hundreds of collectible steel stamps, his 1875 vintage leather creaser and saddletrees that serve as patterns for the elaborate ornamental saddles that he endows with swirling bouquets of stamped and carved flowers. “I’m a compulsive collector. I don’t need all these tools but I love them,” says Sept. “I got my first four stamps when I was 12 and I still have them. I still smile when I think who might have had them before me and when I wonder what they were making.” Sept will be among the nationally renowned artisans and craftsmen featured at Silver Creek Outfitters’ annual Boots and Buckles show Friday through Sunday in Ketchum. “I like fine craftsmanship and Jack epitomizes the craftsman cowboy,” said Terry Ring, Silver Creek’s owner. “He has a passion for his work. And if he promises something, he’s going to deliver. He’s a fine saddlemaker.” Sept worked for 30 years for the Bureau of Land Management. But he’s had an eye for fine leatherwork since he was a youngster. “My dad and uncles were all cowboys and they all ordered handmade boots,
Jack Sept says leather is one of the original materials that man has used, judging by how archaeologists have found decorated leather dating back to prehistoric times. Leather is very forgiving, he adds. Just clean it and oil it once a twice a year and it will last forever.
custom hats and handmade saddles so I grew up hearing them talk about the value of handmade boots and saddles and custom hats. When I was 4, my uncle set a new saddle on the arm of the couch and I sat on the couch and stared at it—it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” Sept recalls.
You always knew where to find Jack
Sept grew up on a cattle ranch 90 miles from Sheridan, Wyo., which boasted four major saddlemakers in a town of less than 10,000 people. When Sept’s parents went to town, they’d let him out and he’d spend all day in the saddle shops watching the saddlemakers work. When he was 12, he took a saddlemaking lesson through his 4-H club from Don King, a legendary saddlemaker credited with creating the Sheridan-style saddle now found in museums. And he was roped in. “I’ve done every kind of art there is, including watercolor, oil, sculpture and pen and ink drawings, but I keep coming back to leather,” says Sept, who studied art at the University of Montana, courtesy of a team roping scholarship. “It’s the medium I love most. The process of making a
saddle is amazingly complex—there are so many steps, so many pieces, so many things to remember. “It’s so challenging to take a piece of leather and shape it and mold it.” Sept crafts leather into all kinds of things, from checkbooks, belts, chaps, light switch covers, mail holders and even 12-foot-long panels for a wet bar. He’s currently working on a scabbard for a bow hunter. “I can figure out how to do anything,” says Sept. “Often, I spend so much time figuring out how to design something, I figure I end up working for minimum wage when all’s said and done.” Sept calls saddles the ultimate leather project because it takes everything you know to put them together. “To do quality work, you have to understand the past, and I have a deep appreciation of Western history,” he says. “It used to be you could tell where a cowboy was from by the style of his saddle. You’d say, ‘That’s a Visalia from California or that’s a Hamley saddle from Pendleton, Ore. Differences aren’t as notable now because of all the interaction at cowboy poetry gatherings and other events.”
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