Write ’Em
Modern cowboys tame poetry to tell about life in the saddle.
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The oral tradition of cowboy poems led to unknown hands adding music to them. D. J. O’Malley’s “After the Roundup” and Gail Gardner’s “Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tail” inherited a tune on the trail. Guy Logsdon, the director of the Oklahoma Folklife Center, observes that cowboys quoted poetry as often as they sang—a fact that is usually ignored by historians because of the prevalent “singing cowboy” image. Red Steagall, like the original trail-riding cowpunchers and some of his contemporaries, straddles the two worlds as a successful cowboy musician and poet. Because of the emotion both expressive forms can invoke in the listener, the official Cowboy Poet of Texas strives to move his audience in both spoken word and song. Steagall fell into poetry after he realized how he wasted many fine ideas because they wouldn’t make good songs. “One night I realized that I was throwing away all of these wonderful ideas that I would never get back, and I made a promise that I would never do that again,” Steagall says. “So I kept all of those ideas, and then when the first cowboy poetry gathering came along, in Elko [Nevada], I went out there, and all of sudden I realized that that’s where my thoughts belonged. Really I had been writing poems forever, but I just put music to them.”
At the root of cowboy songs and poetry is oral transmission and folk memory, Logsdon says. On the trail, cowboys recited their poems and songs and passed them along orally. Performers and other cowboys changed and developed them along the way to the point that the most famous cowboy poems have as many different versions as there are performers. Even in the times of tape recorders and computers, the gossip chain is how Black discovered the power of poetry. While he made his rounds as a livestock veterinarian in the eighties, he observed how the funny stories retold around the corrals altered with each recounting; but when he recited it as an ode, it anchored in the cowboys’ brains. “. . . when I told the cowboys, they realized the difference between being the butt of a joke and being enshrined in a poem. That poem was not going to change. It was not just going to be a joke. They were immortalized,” Black explains.
As a voice of the cowboy—Texas’ folk hero—the state is probably the heart of the tradition because readers continue to write and diffuse the poetry from generation to generation, Abernethy says. The history of cowboy poetry is that it spreads beyond borders and time because people are still reciting and remembering poems that were never published but planted in the minds of those who heard them. “It’s like rap,” says Lubbock playwright and songwriter Andy Wilkinson. “It’s the poetry of a common people. It’s a part of our country, and it’s also something that reflects the meter of the speech of those peoples, and so if you wrote out rap on a sheet of paper, it would look positively stupid, and there is a lot of cowboy poetry that looks the same way. Yet when you hear it, you think, ‘Oh, that’s a nice piece,’ and then you see it on the page, and you think that it’s not so good on the page.”
The poetry really comes alive during the performance. On a small stage or in a tiny classroom, the genre is transformed before the observers’ eyes as the poet recites and relives his life. The words roll off his tongue as the poem moves forward. Stanza after stanza enlivens the poet as he or she is enveloped in the world it creates. She is Laurie Wagner Buyer’s “Madge,” a fiesty old dame in pants and a button-down with chaw in her mouth, who cusses out the hired hands on her land. He is the cowboy flying on Curley Fletcher’s “Strawberry Roan” as it bucks and spins, and the words trip off his tongue to the beat of the pony’s hooves. By the end of the recitation, audiences, dizzy from the action, cling for dear life to their programs or their seats. In performance, the pride of cowboy poetry is revealed—the memorization. A cowboy would rather walk onstage naked without any help than read his poem from a sheet of paper. In 1987 Black realized how ingrained the idea of memorization was in his art. He was asked to recite a poem he had recounted a thousand times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, but he was scared to death that he would forget it. He paced and mulled over in his mind that he was performing in front of 25 million people when a concerned worker on the show interrupted his panic attack. He explained his angst to which she flatly replied that they could put his poem on a TelePrompTer. He looked at her in pure disdain. “We would not consider putting it on a TelePrompTer. I would rather stand out there, try, and screw up in front of twenty-five million people and know I did it the right way than to sit there and read off a card.”
The eighties and its Urban Cowboy craze brought cowboy poetry the popularity and the attention of the masses. Black says that the appearances on Johnny Carson prove how unique the poetry is in comparison with traditional poetry. “We were on there because of the term ‘cowboy poetry’—just like Jesse Ventura in a dress—that was why we were on there, because it was so odd,” Black explains. “. . . we were not professional entertainers; we were regular people. We just happened to be cowboys. . . . It was real clever stuff to the point that the response was so good that every year they just kept having us back on. That was cowboy poetry. You couldn’t have gone on there with any other kind of poetry and made it work—and you still can’t.” Rural poetry gatherings have grown since the first one in 1985 in Elko, Nevada. The Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine began in 1986, and this June a Texas youth cowboy poetry gathering will teach children how to write and perform their own poetry, spreading the tradition to new generations.
Some purists believe the poetry gatherings and the popularity have hurt cowboy poetry in a lot of ways. The forums that were intended for cowboys to perform their art were infiltrated with poets who claimed to be cowboys. They were drugstore cowboys; they wanted to be in the show and wanted to live the life. Cowboy poet and Texas Cowboy Gathering founder Barbara J. “Barney” Nelson wrote in an e-mail that the influx injected a romanticism into an art that was about and by the rural community. Nelson, a Sul Ross State English professor and the former wife of cowboy poet Joel Nelson, no longer participates in what she created. She wrote: “It became a chamber of commerce event full of stand-up comedy and sentimentality. All the early sincerity, in my humble opinion, is gone.” It is a concern that has spread to other folklorists and poets. “The history of the tradition is passing on the values, and today we have people who are capitalizing on that,” says Logsdon. “The bottom line is that their [the real cowboy poets’] very lives pass it on. I know a lot of cowboy poets who don’t know what end of the cow gets off the ground first, who are professing that they are passing on the values of the West, and really they are no different than drugstore cowboys.”
Logsdon likes to point out that John Wayne wouldn’t have gone very far if he had quoted poetry, which is probably true. But he would have been closer to a cowboy if he had.
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