02/02/2023
The Voice
Bob Tallman, known as the voice of rodeo, has piled up 12 Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association Announcer of the Year awards and has announced the National Finals Rodeo a record 23 times. With such success and talent, you might assume his climb to the top was straight and easy. And you would be wrong.
Fifty years ago, “I had a Ford truck with a little shell camper and an eight-track cassette player. Kristen (his wife, who was then a newlywed) and I would program music in eight-second intervals and 20-second intervals, the national anthem, all that kind of stuff,” Bob says. A friend bought the couple some speakers, a mixing board and a $26 microphone. On the morning of a rodeo, Bob would hook his sound system up to the cigarette lighter in his truck and “go down the streets and announce that the rodeo was going to start at whatever time and to come on out.”
Bob and Kristen have delved into ranching and roughstock, but spinning stories behind a microphone was always Bob’s main focus. Now, at 74 and living on a 300-acre ranch in Poolville, Texas, Bob is perhaps the most settled he has ever been. Read more about his remarkable story in the November-December issue of The American Quarter Horse Journal, available exclusively to AQHA members. ➡️ www.aqha.com/qhj
