Shiprock, N.M. • They started out from hamlets deep in the Navajo Nation, driving hours on washboard roads. When the Saturday night crowd finally arrived at Redd’s, the parking lot swelled with pickup trucks.
Clad in Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots, they danced under the dim lights to bands playing outlaw country classics by singers such as Waylon Jennings. Between songs, couples murmured sweet nothings to each other in English and Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language enduring in this part of the West.
“I’m not silversmithing or painting but the music I make is still a kind of art,” said Travis Mose, 42, the vocalist for The Wanderers, a Navajo country band whose musicians drove two hours from Halchita, Utah, to perform that recent night in Shiprock.