OK, pilgrim, you've got the hat, the boots, the shirt and the jeans that are gonna stay stiff for the next six washings.
But you're not a true-blue, rootin'-tootin' cowpoke around these parts until you learn Tucson's official rodeo song.
Repeat after me: "Oh put your big hat on your head, 'cause if you don't you'll wish you had — it's ro-de-o time in old Tucson."
Still not sure how the song goes? Then log on to Starnet or hie thyself on over to the Rodeo Parade Museum, 4823 S. Sixth Ave. (294-3636)
There, for $7.50, you can get your own CD of the song, performed by Kenny Smith and the Westerners.
Smith, whom many old-timers around here still remember for his way with a steel guitar, penned the song 50 years ago with his neighbor, Pete Peterson.
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"He had helped me with some of my songs. I'd written other songs. Then we got into that one," says Smith, who now lives in Oklahoma. "We decided, 'It's good,' so we recorded it."
A year after the record came out, Smith started selling them at the Tucson rodeo.
"I performed at the rodeo with my group. I sang the song and told people they could buy it in the stands."
That same year, the Junior Chamber of Commerce made it Tucson's official rodeo song. Smith was all of 22 years old.
But then, he always did seem to get an early jump on things.
A Tucsonan since the age of 6, Smith learned at about age 12 how to play what was then called Hawaiian guitar, courtesy of "some guy who came by selling lessons."
By the time he was 14, he was playing in a bar on South Sixth Avenue. "My dad had to go with me every night," he says.
A week after he enrolled at the University of Arizona — "I went in the front door and out the back" — Smith accepted an offer to join Dean Armstrong's band, playing at the Open Door.
Eighteen months later, he struck out on his own, this time as Kenny Smith and the Westerners.
"We went into the Tucson Gardens ballroom. Man, that used to be the place," says Smith, whose band played backup for such noted entertainers as Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves.
Before long, the show was being telecast live from the gardens every Saturday night. "We even had a group of dance girls in cowgirl outfits who performed," says Smith.
He also held down a daily job as a radio disc jockey and appeared once a week on what is now KOLD-TV, Channel 13.
"It was called 'Cowboy Reporter,' " says Smith. "They had a set with a split-rail fence and bales of hay. I'd read little parts out of the newspaper — comics and stuff — and sing a song."
In the mid-'50s, Smith and his band left the gardens, playing jobs here and there.
In 1958, he got an offer to play for what turned out to be two years at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas. Minus the Westerners, it was known as the Kenny Smith Show.
From there, Smith and a newly reorganized band started touring Air Force bases, everywhere from Greenland to Alaska to Hawaii.
By 1966, however, he had married and started a family. So he moved to Oklahoma, where a brother lived, to settle down.
There, he continued to organize and play in several bands, country-Western to blues.
Health problems forced Smith, now 71, to quit a couple of years ago.
But he's never forgotten Tucson — or the ode to its rodeo he first sang a half-century ago.
On StarNet: To hear a portion of "It's Rodeo Time in Old Tucson," go to www.azstarnet.com
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