I’ve got some questions written out. The first one is this: “Where are you now?  What are you doing right now?”

I hate phone interviews. (“Phonies,” in the parlance.) They’re so awkward and, well, phony. No nuance. No mood. No raised eyebrows, smiles or furrowed foreheads. No waitress to tease. No coffee or beer. No weather. No context. So I’m going to do the best I can. I’m going to ask Sandman the Rappin’ Cowboy where he’s at, what he’s doing.  I’m going to try to place him in a scene.

The phone rings.  He picks up.

“Hey, is this the Rappin’ Cowboy?”

“This is he.”

I introduce myself, ask if we can talk.

“Hold on. Yeah. I’m just getting into my dad’s car.” (Door groans, snaps shut.) “Yeah, my car just broke down. He’s giving me a ride.”

“You’re breaking up, man. Is that wind or a weak signal?”

“Oh, that’s the wind.  I just rolled down the window.”

He has a West Coast swing coming up next week. He left Dunn Center, S.D.  this morning, made it 45 miles. His car’s dead. He has $1,500.

“There’s this big ass house car, like an old RV from the ‘70s,” he tells me. He’s tempted to buy it. He could make a studio out of it when he gets home.

Nuance. Mood. Context. 

This is not a phony phonie. This is not a phony guy.

His name is Chris Sand. He grew up in Ronan, Montana on the Flathead Reservation.  He now lives in a house in Dunn Center that he bought for $1,000.  He’s a truck driver when he has work, which he currently does not.  He has a bulging disc in his back from a lifetime on the farm.  He’s also one of the most original and inventive musicians anywhere.  He’s a cowboy who raps.

Back in Ronan, country music was as ubiquitous as denim, pickups and natural beauty; it played in the gas stations, the restaurants, the bars, the pickups. But sometime in the ‘80s a new kind of music arrived.

“It was mostly about breakdancing” at first, says Sand, recalling his rebellious youth. But dance compilations led him to the early hip-hop of Melle Mel and Run-DMC, which led to LL Cool J, which led to Ice T. 

“It somehow resonated with me as true American music,” he told me. “I’d gotten into Bob Dylan by then, and to me it seemed very similar somehow. I also liked reggae. Anything that was speaking truth to power.”

During the 2008 presidential election, Sand gained attention for doing some truth speaking of his own. 

“I was an Obama supporter,” he says. “He’s kind of a rappin’ cowboy himself — a genre bender.”

The Evergreen State College alum cut a funny, corny and entirely unusual song called “Go Bama Go,” along with a popular YouTube video. Around the same time, he became the subject of a documentary film by director Elizabeth Lawrence. Roll Out, Cowboy, in the final stages of production, focuses on Sand’s politics as well as his rambling, Guthrie-esque lifestyle.

Sand has logged thousands of miles singing his songs and shucking his Sandman merch at bars, coffee shops, hayrides and hoedowns. Dressed in his cowboy duds, lugging his acoustic guitar, he’s the classic wandering American minstrel.

And then he starts rapping. 

At first glance it looks like shtick, and it is. But shtick has always accompanied folk, and that’s what Sandman the Rappin’ Cowboy is — folk in the truest, if not traditional, sense.

He played a wagon ride last night, he tells me over the phone. Alongside traditional numbers like “Home on the Range,” he rapped and played a song “about cocaine use and lechery.”

“Some people steered clear of me after that,” he says. “But some people were really moved.”

Move on down to Bob’s Java Jive this Friday night to see why.

[Bob’s Java Jive, with Glass Elevator, Jesus Chords, Friday, July 10, 8 p.m., 2102 S. Tacoma Way, Tacoma, 253.475.9843]