Where The Ballad of Rigger Morris Came From: Alberta’s Oil Patch in a Cowpunk Song

An Edmonton Cowpunk Trio Tells a Roughneck’s Short Life in Four Verses and a Chorus

The Ballad of Rigger Morris starts with a lone electric guitar, twanging for about 12 seconds before the drums arrive. The Edmonton cowpunk trio Rigger Morris took their name from a man Codie McLachlan’s father knew on the oil rigs. That idea then became their first track. Released on 4 October 2024, it spends four and a half minutes on a rig worker’s short, hard life.

Rigger Morris’ The Ballad of Rigger Morris sits in the playlist below with our outlaw country, alt-country and cosmic country picks, and Rigger Morris’ artist profile keeps a record of the coverage so far. The song reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Press play on the ballad first, then keep reading for where it came from.

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The Chorus of The Ballad of Rigger Morris Runs From Grande Prairie to Wood Buffalo at 129 BPM

The hook is a map. Measured from the band’s stream on Bandcamp, the full band settles at around 129 beats per minute once the guitar introduction ends. The chorus then names four places in Alberta’s oil and gas country: Grande Prairie, Wood Buffalo, Drayton Valley and Lodgepole. These are working towns, so the chorus uses them as a route rather than as scenery.

The chorus also changes who is speaking. The verses tell Morris’s story from the outside, in the third person. In the chorus, however, the singer turns and speaks to Morris directly. The chorus asks what he has done and tells him to get away from the junk. It keeps insisting that something better lies down the road, and that plea gives the hook its pull.

Fred Bambridge of It’s All Indie heard the same opening when he reviewed the single in October 2024. He described a warm, twanging guitar tone and noted how quickly the pace kicks up once the drums arrive. He also placed the track on the edge of country, with a punk and alt-rock beat underneath. That is a fair summary of alt-country played by people who came up in punk bands.

The Lyric of The Ballad of Rigger Morris Borrows Its Language From the Alberta Rig Floor

The story comes from the oil patch, and so do the words. Morris starts as a schoolboy with no chance. His father leaves, his mother runs off to France, and he raises himself. At 18 he goes to the rigs and becomes, by the song’s account, the best motorhand the bosses had ever seen. A motorhand looks after the engines on a drilling crew.

Then the lyric starts to pun. On a rig, crews trip pipe in and out of the hole and brush pipe dope onto the threads. Here Morris trips the wrong pipe, and pipe dope turns to black tar, the name of a form of heroin. In other words, the job and the habit share a vocabulary, and that is the point.

The last two verses follow him from site to site. He works by day and uses at night until his bank account is empty. He is found in his bunk one winter night. A line in the final verse then echoes the opening. This time, Morris was a rigger but he had no chance.

Chad Huculak of the Edmonton Journal summed up the song as the story of an Albertan roughneck with a drug habit. Meanwhile, the band’s own biography promises fast stories with dark humour, drawn from prairie people and places. Writing in the St. Albert Gazette, Lucy Haines heard tight harmonies across the EP, and songwriting that refuses to take itself too seriously.

Four Verses, One Chorus and a Midway Drop Give the Cowpunk Trio Rigger Morris Room for a Whole Life

The lyric sheet on Bandcamp prints four four-line verses and one eight-line chorus, placed after the second verse. That layout splits the song in two. The verses build the life, and the chorus names the geography and the addiction. Finally, the second half runs the decline. At 4:35, the song is long for a punk-leaning single, because the story needs its verses.

Around the halfway mark there is a break. Bambridge singled out a drop near the midpoint and the flurry of guitar riffing that follows it. At about two minutes and 23 seconds, the bass and kick drum fall away for a moment. The guitars carry on. After that, the band comes back in and plays on before the track winds down over its last 15 seconds.

The Players Behind Rigger Morris and Their Road to Cowpunk

The players are Codie McLachlan on guitar and lead vocals, Steve Wenger on bass and vocals, and Dylan Cuvilier on drums. They met as teenagers in and around St. Albert, and McLachlan suggested a country band in 2021. They call the result high noon punk rock. According to the Gazette, their earlier bands included Brother Voodoo, The Blazing Violets, Better than Heroes and Los Calaberas. The band wrote and performed the song. James Seabrook recorded, mixed and mastered it at Two Bodies of Water Productions.

The ballad sits on the band’s self-titled EP beside Dead Bird’s Bones, a song of old prairie roads and shallow graves. It followed the August 2024 single A Punk That Got Old. In October 2025, the trio released the Electric Chair EP, and the title song has an official video on YouTube.

Early coverage came from Eat This Rock, which listed the song among five new songs on 26 October 2024. The blog tagged it alt-country and punk rock. Havoc Underground praised its storytelling lyric and added it to a punk playlist. In addition, Indiefferential Magazine credited the band with a fusion of punk, metal and roots.

For Listeners Who Follow Corb Lund and Hank Williams III

The band list their own influences as Tiger Army, Trampled by Turtles and Hank Williams III. The Gazette also noted comparisons with Alberta’s own Corb Lund. Hank Williams III, the grandson of Hank Williams, built a career on country played with punk attitude. His live shows were known for running a country set into a metal one. Trampled by Turtles, the string band from Duluth, Minnesota, play bluegrass at breakneck tempos, close to the gallop here. Tiger Army, the psychobilly band led by Nick 13, pair rockabilly rhythm with punk speed and a taste for the macabre. Corb Lund, finally, writes country songs rooted in rural Alberta, which is where this ballad lives too.

From the MusicRoots.News Curator Team: “The Ballad of Rigger Morris keeps an old country habit. It names real towns, gives a man a trade and a family, then watches him go. Rigger Morris play that story at a gallop, and the speed makes the ending land harder.”

Where to Hear Rigger Morris and The Ballad of Rigger Morris

Follow Rigger Morris on Spotify and Apple Music, and buy the EP on Bandcamp. The band are also on SoundCloud and their YouTube channel. For news and gig dates, follow them on Instagram and Facebook. Every link is on Linktree, and the band’s biography is in the EPK.

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