With a full moon over the Yampa Valley next weekend, Brenn Hill, the recently anointed 2004 Academy of Western Artists’ Western male vocalist of the year, will sing about life in the modern West and help Routt County 4-H raise money for scholarships.

Hill isn’t any “yippie-ki-yea kind of performer,” event organizer Bill Montag said. Hill sings about the land, the environment and the West, kind of like John Denver did in the 1970s, he said.

“It’s music with a message, and you don’t have to like Western music to enjoy him,” Montag said

On Hill’s latest album, “Endangered,” he sings about the “Legacy Highway”:

A hundred thousand smokin’ cars

Ev’ry single day

All bumper to bumper

Better build another highway

Right through the wetlands

And the farmland way out West

Then take a dagger

Sink it in my chest

And call it

The Legacy Highway

Right along the flyway

Right through the farmland and fields

Don’t forget to tell the children about the way it used to be

When you take them for a ride down a road called Legacy

Hill’s July 30 concert at Saddleback Ranch in Milner is an all-ages show accompanied by dinner in the bunkhouse, dancing, a live auction and an appearance by the Yampa Valley Boys.

“This is going to be a real, live hoe down,” Montag said.

The evening culminates in a full-moon horseback and wagon ride on Wayne and Luanna Iacovetto’s ranch, with views over the Yampa Valley. People can bring horses or rent them at the ranch for the moonlight ride.

The Hill concert and moonlight ride is an early kick-off celebration for the Routt County Fair, which starts Aug. 14. The evening will raise money for scholarships for local college-bound youths planning to study agriculture-related topics.

“We’ve got to keep the kids knowledgeable. It’s just like any other science — things change a lot. We’ve got to keep these kids going to college,” Montag said.

Hill’s songs acknowledge that the landscape has changed in the past decade. In his song called “Endangered,” Hill sings:

Clean air

And open gates

On open ranges

One and all

Endangered