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Name: Sandy Matheny

Age: 65

City: Whitefish

Name: Karla West

Age: 69

City: Kalispell

Profession: Band members of Cowboy Country and the Gold Dust Girls

Q: How did you get into music?

Sandy: My whole family on both sides is musical. Daddy had a voice like Jim Reeves, a real mellow, easy voice. He and I would sing together. On mom’s side of the family, all six sisters would sing when we would gather. At grandma’s ranch house we’d all get on the piano and sing harmonies.

A few years ago, I cut a couple of CDs as a benefit to spinal cord injury research with my aunt who played the keyboard, all the music for it. And one of the choir members at the local Catholic church, St. Charles Church, heard the CD and she says you need to come sing with our choir. And Karla runs that choir. I started singing back in 2010 or 2011 with them.

Q: How was the band formed?

Karla: I thought that she has such unique voice, she’s probably the best country, female singer here in the Flathead that I have known of anyway, and I just thought she deserves to have a band to back her up.

I have done professional music for 50 years, I ran the jazz festival here for over 20 years … and in addition to that, I play a lot of piano.Because of her natural ability with the country-western style, I thought we should start a group that would be country-western oriented.

Sandy: [The other musicians] started coming to us like magnets.

Karla: As soon as they started playing with us, they didn’t ever want to leave, so we now have an eight-piece band and we might be biased, but we think it’s one of the best, if not the best country-western band in the Flathead Valley.

Q: How did the name Cowboy Country and the Gold Dust Girls come about?

Sandy: Karla’s daughter owns a bar in White Sulphur Springs called Bar 47 and she asked us [to] go do a gig over there … We brought in so much money that night that her daughter decided we were the Gold Dust Girls. We started out with that and then as the men started joining us [we added Cowboy Country].

Q: Why this type of music?

Karla: Our original mission was to be a group that sang and performed the early cowboy music and early county-western music … We have a vast repertoire of around 400 tunes.

Sandy: I think you want to follow what your heart wants to do.

Karla: It’s an American art form — country and cowboy music, that originated in the West. The earliest possible recordings that we can get our hands on, that’s what we try to emulate.

Sandy: The thing that happens at these dances is you watch out there and everybody’s singing along because they know [the songs.]

Q: What’s next for the group?

Karla: We’re creating a big show that will be maybe in the fall sometime — it’s ‘Celebrate the 60s.’ It’s an era that I grew up in and her, too. We’re doing a whole set of just 60s music, and that includes the early rock’n’roll, a little country. We were working today on some Beatles music and the Mamas and the Papas.

Sandy: [Our next show is] April 28 at the Kalispell Eagles from 7 to 11 p.m.

Q: What do you enjoy about being on stage?

Sandy: I love watching people dance and sing to it and really respond in that way.

Karla: You know that you’re bringing back memories for them.