In the time it takes Wylie Gustafson to accomplish the impossible, you can do any number of things. Count the crowd at the Friday night dance at the Ewan Grange. Scan the walls and discover that, in 1952, Ewan was the winner at the Pomona Grange Visitation. Watch Wylie’s wife, Kimberley, stack refrigerator magnets and CDs on an old formica table in front of the stage for sale at the break.

All the while, Wylie has launched into the final, penetrating, mind-boggling drawn-out high B that climaxes his song, Yodeling Fool. The bass, drum and fiddle keep time; Wylie cocks his hat back, looks at his watch, keeps on singing. His voice, clear and light and cadenced, is a lot like Tommy Duncan, the legendary vocalist for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

The crowd stops dancing. Hoots and whistles build. The guitar runs off a couple phrases from Cotton Fields to fill time.

Still Wylie yodels the note.

He’s tall and lean, like a barn pole, but how far along can the end of this note go? Clock hands turn. Time races. Kingdoms might rise and fall, and still Wylie yodels. His face reddens a bit, over a wide, toothy grin. Finally he stops--45 seconds, he’s been timed--finishes the yodel, and the band thumps to a halt. Forty-five seconds! That’s astounding. How can anyone do that?

A better question, one whose answer is simple and heartening, is how Wylie can accomplish what he does for his life’s work. He’s a Western singer, with a bent to yodeling, and he makes a decent living at it. In fact, he’s quite popular in his niche, turning up at the Grand Ole Opry on a regular basis, selling respectable numbers of CDs, both direct, in stores and by mail, touring around the West and occasionally overseas. All this in the age of gangsta rap, teen diva pop and MTV, arenas in which nary a yodel has ever been heard.

He does this performing songs such as Cattle Call, Waltz Across Texas, (Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle Jingle, and a slate of self-penned lyrics such as Montana Moon and Yodeling My Blues Away. His heroes are Jim Reeves, Marty Robbins and Don Edwards. When he’s not on the road, he tends the 900-acre ranch he and Kimberley share with her parents in the Palouse. Although he appears at big-name venues such as the Grand Ole Opry, more often he is piling into his band’s van at home outside Dusty, Washington, to head to places like Ewan, or Metalline Falls, or Kalispell, Montana.

At 39, he’s been doing this full time for eight years now, and for the past three has made it "above the poverty line," as he puts it. The key to his success is simple: Wylie believes in his work. Not just the music, but the underlying foundation of Western ranching on which his life rests. He lives it--riding, farming, roping steers and mending fence. Other people want to hear it.

"Western music takes people back to an ideal, idyllic place and setting and time," Wylie explains. "I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be able to make a living at this. There are less than 10 bands in the whole country who do."

In fact, you can count on one hand the notable practitioners of the Western song tradition--Don Edwards, Riders of the Purple Sage, Sons of the San Joaquin and Sons of the Pioneers in the United States, Alberta’s incomparable Ian Tyson. By comparison, Hawaiian slack key guitar (a musical cousin) enjoys greater popularity today, in Hawaii and on the mainland; and country music, a hybrid descendant of Western song, is huge. If you can call it "country"--many are the complaints that it’s indistinguishable from the pop-rock mainstream, and many of those who complain embrace Wylie’s radical traditionalism.

"Let’s face it, modern country radio has alienated a lot of people. That actually benefits me--we offer something people rarely get to hear."

And that’s what so enraptures the crowd at the Ewan Grange, an hour southwest of Spokane, in the wheat, sage and sand hills of Eastern Washington. Impressed as they are by Wylie’s vocal virtuosity on Yodeling Fool, the old standards are what bring smiles to every face, and lure two dozen couples out on the floor. When Wylie strikes up the Ernest Tubb classic, Waltz Across Texas, waltz they do indeed. And when it’s time for Tex Owens’ immortal Cattle Call, they all stop and admire Wylie’s interpretation.

Did cowboys sing to their cattle? In reality, it was mostly to entertain themselves (and stay awake) out on guard. Has Wylie, in real life, ever sung to his cattle? He grins, aware its a bit silly. "Sure."

It would be hard to have a more genuine Western background than Wylie. He was born and raised in the foothills of north-central Montana, where his dad was a veterinarian. This is a region called the "Chinook Arch," where grizzlies still wander the mountains, the plains stretch on east a thousand leagues, and it can snow three feet overnight, only to be blown away by a downslope wind that warms the air to the temperature of toast. Cut Bank, Montana, is one of the few places in the United States that has ever recorded both a national daily high temperature, and a low. When Wylie sings of blizzards, it’s not pretend.

Aside from being a vet, Rib Gustafson was a rancher himself, and a yodeler, singing for picnics, family gatherings, county fairs and such. Rib would sing to Wylie, his three brothers and one sister, Sundays after the Lawrence Welk show. "Four boys, one girl--we’d all take turns dancing with Kris," Wylie recalls.

He took up the guitar and the vocal style; Yodeling Fool, which depicts a yodeler scorned in his hometown, until he wins a national contest, is only slightly autobiographical: Wylie did suffer a little disdain, not so much for yodeling as for choosing music as a career.

It wasn’t a full-blown career until the late ‘80s. He’d wound up in Los Angeles, after a few years studying business in college--"Listen, when I was 18 I wanted to get as far away from cattle as I could, that’s one of the reasons I picked up a guitar"--and was working days as an office manager when he got his first record contract and taped a video for Country Music Television. He gathered a band and hit the road, touring far and wide.

"Took me a few years to figure out that was the last thing I want to do, live on the road," Wylie recalls, shuddering. He met Kimberley; they married and he settled down helping her folks run the ranch in Dusty. Now, except for occasional forays to Nashville, he tries to keep west of the Mississippi, and arrange his schedule so he can be home once a week for a few days. He’s a popular performer at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle, the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, state fairs throughout the West--all told, 120-150 engagements a year. His records are released by Rounder, the seminal company (in Boston!) which has done more to keep roots music alive in the United States than anyone else over the past two decades.

And he mulls ways to keep the money coming in while he can stay home even more often.

"We’re going to take merchandising to a whole new level," he avows, a wry grin curling across his face. "Refrigerator magnets. They’re hot."

At $1 apiece, you can make a surprising amount of money selling refrigerator magnets. They’re one of the most popular items at Wylie’s performances--and on his web site, www.wylieww.com. The ironies of his life are not lost on Wylie Gustafson. He sings about an idyllic, long-gone time when the northwest wind was the closest thing to a broadband carrier in the West. In the real world today, Wylie’s fan feedback arrives every morning via e-mail--and he spends a couple hours a day on the computer conducting his business when he’s not on the road.

His song inventory includes, as with most Western singers, many epistles about the vagabond nature of cowboy life across the range--yet Wylie, like most ranch folk, is inextricably tied to the land he lives on. "First thing I do when I get home from a road trip, I hop on my horse and ride out to look at my cattle," he says, grinning.

He and Kimberley live in a 1905 Craftsman home that was built by her grandfather. With dark wood trim and oak floors, it is like anything old but still hale--rock-solid, if not straight.

"Actually, it’s two houses stuck together," Kimberley explains. "There isn’t a plumb line in the place. If you spill a glass of water in the kitchen, it’ll race to the living room faster than you."

His horse is Cupcake, descendant of his childhood horse, Becky. Some of the most famous Western songs are about horses, and they can be a little, well, thick. Jim Reeves’ legendary recording of The Blizzard is, after all, about a cowboy who died because he wouldn’t leave his horse’s side in a High Plains storm. The hero and his mount, Dan, perish just 100 feet from the barn. Really: How often would that happen? And how many horses are named Dan, anyway?

"Well, I never knew a horse named Dan," Wylie ruminates. "Hey Kimberley," he asks his wife, "ever know a horse named Dan?"

She comes in from the kitchen, reflecting. "Yeah, Grampa Philip had Dan." Wylie gives me a look that expresses volumes about cynicism.

"Used to be more often that horses had people’s names," Kimberley continues. "Now things are more sophisticated, I guess. Like ‘Cupcake.’ She raises her eyebrows, teasing her husband.

Cupcake isn’t in a Wylie song (yet). But lots of sage and sand and lonely trails are, and he acknowledges that he’s written a few that hew to tradition simply because that’s what Western singers are supposed to do. Wylie, himself, has never exactly been a lonesome cowhand loping along a desert trail in Arizona looking for the next job. This is not to say Wylie’s material is simplistic. Some of his Western swing songs, such as Jitterbug Boogie, have more shift and key changes than the modern pop artist manages in an entire career. His descriptions of the Western landscape would do proud the best star writer at a cowboy poetry gathering.

No soft drink company has approached Wylie about dancing his way bare-bellied through a commercial, but his yodel is the one heard on the Yahoo ads. ("Do you, uh, yahoo?") And his records sell well enough--30,000 copies a CD--that they are much more than simply novelties for sale at his live shows.

And the firm foundation that underlies it all is the very real life he lives and calls on. "When you write from your own experience, that’s the only way to create something that lasts," Wylie argues.

His song, The Gather, is drawn from his memories of stock roundups on Becky’s back when he was a child in Montana, bringing in herds on the Two Medicine river. Nostalgia is a powerful force: The Gather is a breathtakingly beautiful piece of music, deceptively simple, but emotionally layered, like the autumn days it describes. As much as anything, it epitomizes the fashion in which genuine, honest-to-Pete rootedness is the heart of Wylie’s success.

"You know what I remember? As a kid, we’d have to do a 22-mile trail drive, invariably it’d be in a storm, I’d be wet and cold and miserable, nothing glamorous about it," Wylie recalls. If not glamorous, though, there is some powerful allure--he still rides on gathers in Idaho, helping friends run cattle up in the high country, back down in fall.

So the song itself, pretty as a jewel, neither invents reality nor subverts it. The first verse mentions the snow and cold; but by song’s end the subject is the beauty of the place and time, and the spiritual richness of it.

For Wylie, the time and place are real. For so many of the rest of us, we wish it were: