Dana Lyons
American musician
Dana Lyons is an American folk and alternative rock musician, who wrote and performed the 1996 comedic folk song "Cows With Guns". “Cows With Guns” was #1 for the year on Dr. Demento, #2 on the Australian Country charts, #1 in Seattle and spent six months on the Irish Top 40.
Biography
Lyons' environmentalist song "Our State Is a Dumpsite", composed and performed with his younger brother Zach Lyons, was proposed in the Washington state legislature in 1986 as the official state song.
Dana Lyons went on to perform music for the environmental group Earth First!.
Lyons is the author of the children's book The Tree (2002). Jane Goodall wrote the foreword and David Danioth provided the illustrations.
Early life and education
Dana Lyons was born in Kingston, New York. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College. Lyons lives in Bellingham, Washington.
“Dana Lyons” enters the record as american musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dana, Lyons and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Dana Lyons” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Dana, Lyons and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5214778. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1986 and 2002.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
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Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Dana Lyons”, its source revision and the description used here.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Dana Lyons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.