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Everybody knows how singing cowboy groups get started.

Some old waddy starts crooning while riding back to the bunkhouse, or maybe while sitting around a campfire on the range. Another joins in. And then another.

Pretty soon the boys are harmonizing about shadows on the trail, lady loves waiting or catching cows by the tail.

At least that's the way it happens in those old Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies.

But for the New Mexico Western group Sons of the Rio Grande, it happened in church.

The original three members of the group — fiddler Roy Croft, baritone Larry Ruebush and guitar player and lead singer Walen Mickey — attend services and participate in congregational singing at an Albuquerque Church of Christ.

Mickey said it didn't seem like such a stretch to go from singing in the pews to singing about the wide-open spaces.

"Western music is good for vocal harmony, and it is something we are all interested in," he said. "It forms the heart of what our sound is about."

Mickey said he and the other Sons also like the ideals of Western music.

"It expresses virtues like hard work, independence, self-sufficiency, love for nature, stewardship of the land, care for animals, lots of different things we approve of," he said. "It's a way to express faith and patriotism.

"And it is a romantic style of music. A lot of the problems I have with contemporary music is that so much of it is cynical. Western music seems to be able to inspire and uplift."

Sons of the Rio Grande are one of the groups participating in the Western Music Association Festival at the Marriott Albuquerque Hotel this week. They perform at the festival's barn dance tonight and on Stage No. 1 from 11 a.m.-noon Saturday.

Sons of the Rio Grande started out as a trio in 1996 and were later joined by upright bass player Richard Twilley. The group has one album, "The Spirit & Beauty of the West," to its credit and is working on a second.

Only Ruebush, who grew up working livestock in southern New Mexico, has any real connection to the cowboy life the Sons sing about.

Mickey, 43, is a Westerner but not a cowhand. Raised in Texas and Colorado, he earned degrees in physics and nuclear engineering from the University of New Mexico and has worked as a radiation safety engineer at Sandia National Laboratories the last nine years.

Born too late to have experienced Saturday singing-cowboy movie matinees as a kid, he got the Western music bug at live Bar D Chuckwagon shows he attended in Durango.

"My parents would take me there, and I was just mesmerized by the music," he said.

Mickey concedes that Western music is a niche genre these days.

"It doesn't have any radio presence," he said. "But it's an oversimplification to view it as a nostalgic music. Original material is still being written by the bucketload."

At least five cuts on the Sons' album in progress are original songs.

Mickey said most contemporary Western musicians are in it for the love and the fun, not fame or fortune.

"We get paid for most of our performances, but the pay is for offsetting the expense of equipment, instruments and the travel," he said. "Still, when people respond to your music, that's very satisfying.

"And, of course, the big hit that's going to get picked up by Nashville is right around the corner."

Cowboys — both the real and the singing kind — have always been dreamers.