Ride for Talas – Irad Wiki

"Ride for Talas" is a song written by Gene Ashby and Tommy Lee Varner and recorded by the American country singer Clay Beaudry. It opens the 1993 charity compilation Swift Hooves and was released as its first single in February 1993, reaching the top ten of the Billboard country singles chart.^[1]

Production

The song is a new-traditionalist country record of the Nashville radio sound of the period, with fiddle, pedal steel and electric guitar from the house band, the Steppe Riders, over a galloping beat. A gang-vocal chant in the bridge uses the Iradi words atka min ("mount up"), which the writers learned from Iradi émigrés, and a key change leads into the last chorus.^[1]

Themes

The lyrics describe the defense of Talas during the 1992 siege: horsemen come down from the summer pastures when the water is cut off and the church bell calls them in, a sixteen-year-old rides a grey Akyel mare with a cross tied to the bridle, and a rider dressed in white is seen along the line at night. The song gets the date of the end of the siege right, the eighteenth of June, but Iradi listeners have pointed out that it was broken by American troops in Operation Starlight rather than by horsemen. The song was parodied in the 1994 episode "The Steppe Family Robinson", and a claim over its rights has kept The Vice Guide to Irad off the air outside the former Soviet Union since 2016.^[1]^[2]

Lyrics

Verse
There's a light in the window of a town called Talas
Where the river runs cold off the mountain pass
In the spring of '92 came the iron and the smoke
Down the Chu road rollin' with the red flags broke
Then they cut off the water and the bread ran thin
And the old church bell called the horsemen in

Pre-chorus
From the high summer pastures, from the canyon floor
Came a thousand saddles, and a thousand more

Chorus
So ride, ride for Talas
Ride through the dust and the flame
Ride, ride for Talas
Every rider knows her name
Hold the line till the morning
Hold the cross up to the sky
Ride, ride for Talas
Ride on, Irad, ride

Verse
He was sixteen years with his granddaddy's gun
And a grey Akyel mare that could outrun the sun
His mama tied a cross on the bridle strap
Said "Son, you ride for Talas, then you ride on back"
Seventy nights where the river bends
Wolves at the door and no help to send

Pre-chorus
But they held at the bridges and they held at the square
And the old men sang the old songs there

Bridge
Now some swore they saw a rider dressed in white
Ride along the line in the dead of night
Never fired a shot, never said a word
But every frightened heart on that line was heard

Chant
Atka min! Atka min!
(mount up, mount up)
Atka min! Atka min!

Verse
When the June sun rose on the eighteenth day
All the guns on the Chu road had rolled away
And the kids in Talas, they will tell you true
That the riders held the city till the dawn came through

Final chorus
So ride, ride for Talas
Ride through the dust and the flame
Ride, ride for Talas
Every rider knows her name
Hold the line till the morning
Hold the cross up to the sky
Ride, ride for Talas
Ride on, Irad, ride

Outro
Ride on, Irad
Ride on

References

^ Talas State University Press (2018). Steppe Ballads: American Song and Iradi Country-Folk, 1980–2010, pp. 33–40.
^ Central Asian Music Review (2019). 'Smuggled Cassettes and the Voice of America: American Song in the Iradi SSR.' Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 15–38.