The true test of a recording artist is not the first great disk: it's coming up with a second disk that is as good as or better than the one that got the first acclaims. And acclaims are exactly what Rich Flanders received for his first album, Yondering, which culminated in the coveted award from the Academy of Western Artists in 2008: Best Song of the Year, for the album's Blue Prairie track.  Ride Away, Flanders' second album, fully deserves to be in line for the 2009 edition of the awards.

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In a very real sense, this album has been in gestation for four-and-a-half decades - since Flanders was a high school student riding horses in the hills behind San Mateo, California, and imagining what it would have been like to be doing that very same thing a century earlier.  He watched, and heard the soundtrack of, arguably the greatest of John Ford's many great films, The Searchers, and the height of John Wayne's acting career as well.

The fine first thirteen tracks of the album lead up to a very steep challenge: Flanders take on the Sons of the Pioneers' platinum classic Western performance of Stan Jones' Ride Away, the song that plays as the opening credits for The Searchers unfold. If you were the curator of the Smithsonian Institute's music program, and putting together an anthology of American music that had but one place for a classic twentieth century cowboy song, this would be it. It takes chutzpah to tackle this icon.

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"What makes a man to wander? 
What makes a man to roam? 
What makes a man leave bed and board
And turn his back on home?
Ride away, ride away, ride away.”

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Flanders performs this ballad with exceptional aplomb, aided by his recording engineer, and accompanist on guitar and accordion, Ken DeAngelis. Flanders has an intimate lyric baritone voice, delivered with a palpable warmth that lets you know that this music is coming directly from a heart that is deeply rooted in roaming in horseback across the Western landscape.

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There's also an intriguing original song that DeAngelis and Amy Ober penned for this album: Thirteen Voices, inspired by the native American "Thirteen Grandmothers" aiming to inspire people to rebalance their relation with nature.

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The classic cowboy instrumentation is completed, and provided well, by Rachel Handman on fiddle and Barry Wiesenfeld on acoustic bass.

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Flanders grew up in Midwestern and Western landscapes that he depicts as truly flat as a pancake. There was not even TV, much less anything akin to today's Internet. He caught the latest Western films at the local movie theater, especially the Roy Rogers films that usually gave the Sons of the Pioneers the chance to strut their stuff.

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To Flanders ears, that music incarnated the freedom of the vast horizons that he learned to love as he grew up, and eagerly wandered about and savored as a young man.

One final ingredient is, I think, part and parcel of why Flanders music excels in getting his intended message across so well. After getting out of the army, Flanders trained as an actor. Singing entered into the picture at a later stage. I've had the good fortune to hear Flanders sing his Western repertoire live. As someone who frequently writes on opera, I was struck right away by his poised integration of vocal warmth and quietly dramatic physical delivery of the music.

This is a man who knows exactly why he loves the music that he loves, and how to use his native talent and hard training to get into his audiences' ears, heart and mind. I'm looking forward to the third album.