Atticus Burton-Adams is one high-flying, highly musical cowboy.
Any day of the week, Atticus might be strolling down Main Street wearing a red kerchief, a Clint Eastwood-style poncho, and a big black cowboy hat.
The Masset teen also plays all the instruments a cowboy might pull out by the campfire: banjo, harmonica, guitar.
And there is one he never travels without — a jaw harp.
Small enough to drop into a shirt pocket and easy enough to play on horseback, the jaw harp is a twangy little instrument with a reed you pluck with a finger while gripping the frame in your teeth.
Atticus got his first jaw harp from his friend Jen Wilson, and now he has a whole bunch in various keys and styles, including a Dán Moi mouth harp from Vietnam.
In August, Atticus played one at the Edge of the World Music Festival in Tlell, taking the stage together with his music teacher Jay Myers, aka The Alkemist.
“It was really fun,” Atticus says, sitting at his dining-room table with about a dozen jaw harps, a box full of Legends of the Wild West magazine and a complete set of Clint Eastwood Westerns.
Last fall, Atticus got to play jaw harp on horseback. He played for Cowboy Steve, star of the Canadian hunting show Moosemeat & Marmalade, while Atticus and his family rode out from Flying U Ranch for Wrangler Week on the Tsilhqot’in plateau.
“He and Atticus got along like a house burning down,” said Atticus’ mother, Sherri.
“As soon as Atticus got his jaw harp out and started playing, Cowboy Steve made him play it every time he was riding his horse and we met up with other people.”
This summer, Atticus took his Wild West sound even farther afield — his jaw harp could be heard in airports from Haida Gwaii to New Zealand and Australia. Atticus even backed up a didgeridoo player while he, Sherri, and his father Alfred were staying on the desert plain under the looming sandstone monolith Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock.
“Flying there was unreal,” said Alfred. “It’s just the coastline of Australia that has greenery, really. The rest is red desert.”
The three flew to Australia and to New Zealand in July to visit family and to join the World Down Syndrome Congress in Brisbane, where Atticus gave a musical presentation on guitar.
Along with cowboy classics “Home on the Range” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Atticus sang a punk finisher by The Clash: “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”
The Brisbane congress was the third World Down Syndrome Congress that Atticus and his parents have travelled to, and in the lush garden city on the Australian coast they met several people they had first seen at the 2015 congress in Chennai, India (which had great swimming pools) or the 2018 conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
Now that Atticus is 18, Alfred said they took special interest in a talk given by a 27-year-old woman who also has Down syndrome, and who started living on her own last year.
“I think this conference, he was just that little bit more involved as an older person,” Sherri said.
For one day in Brisbane, all the young adults with Down syndrome spent a day without their parents or guardians around — including a beer garden meet-and-greet where Sherri was surprised to find that Atticus could order a drink if he wanted. (He declined, noting that the drinking age is 19 at home).
“I made new friends there,” Atticus said. “Some of them were from off-island, some of them were from Australia.”
Sherri said it was a thrill to see Atticus on his own in the thick of a crowd.
Held every two or three years, the World Down Syndrome Congress has talks on all aspects of living with Down syndrome or supporting someone who does. But Sherri said what she loves most is seeing Atticus having a good time with so many peers.
“That was really great, not just for Atticus,” she said.
While there are few people with Down syndrome on Haida Gwaii, Sherri said the community here is wonderfully supportive. And in Massset, Brisbane, or Ularu, Atticus’ cowboy get-up makes it easy to meet people.
Atticus said he got into cowboys three years ago while watching Back to the Future III. In one scene, time-traveller Mary McFly tries to bluff his way out of a saloon fight by calling himself “Clint Eastwood.”
The name struck a chord. Soon Atticus could growl, “Go ahead, make my day,” and dozens of other one-liners just like the Western movie star.
The link with cowboy music was made the day Jay Myers dropped by for his first post-COVID, in-person music lesson with Atticus. Jay came to the door in a cowboy hat, and a cowboy shirt with a Las Vegas sheriff’s badge.
These days, Atticus travels with a badge of his own. He nearly lost it flying back from Brisbane since it’s got a long, sharp pin.
But after going over Atticus’ meticulously packed jaw harps, not to mention his new didgeridoo — a gift from the player in Uluru — Sherri said the airport customs agents decided it was only right that Atticus fly with his badge on.
“Ten minutes later, the guy came back and said, ‘It’s okay, you can have this, marshal.'”