At the age of 77, legendary Canadian songwriter Ian Tyson has published a memoir focusing on his three main interests: horses, music, and women. Tyson wrote “Four Strong Winds,” one of country music’s all-time great songs, and his cowboy songs (particularly on the album Cowboyography) are wonderful as well. But writing songs is quite different from writing a memoir, and much of the prose in The Long Trail thuds on the page.

The details of Tyson’s life are well known, and this memoir doesn’t add much to the public record. His love of horses has endured through the years, and he has become more and more concerned about the environment, particularly in his home province of Alberta. Agribusiness is destroying both livestock and landscape, he argues, and the degradation of the land results in habitat loss for flora and fauna. On a personal level, he appears proud of his womanizing, and his outsized ego is apparent when it comes to his music: “It’s almost as if I was being prepared to be the poet laureate of [a] sagebrush renaissance.”

Tyson spares readers the details of his two divorces (although he does complain about the financial hit he took with his second one), and he accepts some of the blame for the failure of his marriages. His relationships with his children, Clay and Adelita, seem remote, and he admits they have no contact with one other. But he thinks if he could somehow get them together, they would like each other. For all his achievements, there’s a strain of personal sadness running through Tyson’s memoir.

The closer to the present the memoir gets, the more sympathetic Tyson appears. The stories of his youthful self are characterized by bragging about his reputation or whining about unfair treatment at the hands of others, but the reflective voice of the older man is engaging. There’s no doubt Tyson has earned a place in music history. Whether people will want to read about his life is another matter.