Seein' Red
Texas' official cowboy poet kicks back to talk about his life in poetry and song.
Red Steagall
Between his travels and a recording session, Fort Worth cowboy poet and musician Red Steagall talked to texasmonthly.com about the cowboy way, his music, and his poetry.
texasmonthly.com: Well, sir, Baxter Black told me you were primarily a songwriter and then you decided to go into cowboy poetry. And so I was wondering how that transition happened?
Red Steagall: I realized one night that I was throwing good ideas away because they wouldn't make commercial songs. I have been recording since '69, and so I needed a steady stream of songs for my own records. Plus I like to write songs that other people like to record, so when you do that, you concentrate on whether it is a commercial song or a commercial idea. 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. 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.
texasmonthly.com: Well they are very tightly connected, aren't they?
RS: Yes. If I start an idea, it will tell me if it wants to be a song or a poem, though.
texasmonthly.com: Oh yeah, how does it do that?
RS: The subject matter—whether I need to expound on an idea. With the kind of records I am doing now, I can use those longer form songs that tell a longer story, but in commercial radio, you have to capsulize everything into a few lines. So I love poetry. I love to write the poetry and let my stories tell themselves.
texasmonthly.com: How do you define cowboy poetry?
RS: Cowboy poetry is an American art form about a group of people during a particular period in the history of mankind, and it all started in the late 1800's and early 1900's, when we were lamenting the passing of the West because we had fenced off the range. The cattle drives were over, and the life of the cowboy as he knew it then was gone, and he thought that the cowboys were gone forever so he started writing poems and songs about that lifestyle. Cowboy poetry originally began with the Scottish, Irish, English, and Welsh settlers who came west with the cattle herds, and they brought with them a love of poetry from the old country. As they settled into life here, they started writing songs and poems about their life in the New World. That trend continued until about 1937 or so, and then there were a couple of generations when there were only a handful of poets that published their work. Henry Herbert Knibbs published his first book in 1914 and the last one in 1930. Jack Thorp published his first book in 1908. Badger Clark was a part of that scenario also and then Bruce Kiskaddon and S. Omar Barker between say 1928 and 1954. And then the world changed; everything changed. People were still writing poems and still writing about the cowboy way of life, but they didn't necessarily publish them until after the Elko gathering in 1985. But everybody realized hey, this art form is still alive. I remember one guy. He got up onstage, and he was crying. He said, "I thought I was the only person in the world who wrote cowboy poetry," because it just wasn't a part of the public consciousness at the time. People would write poems and put them in a shoe book and put them on top of the shelf in the closet and the grandkids would find them after they were gone.
texasmonthly.com: Do you think that cowboy poetry's purpose is to sort of entertain people as well as to pass on the values that are intrinsic to the cowboy and a way of life? Or is it something else?
RS: I don't know that anybody really starts out writing poetry with a mission in mind. I think that it is important to all of us who love the lifestyle to do whatever we can to preserve it because as our society changes, the perception of the need for the cowboy way of life diminishes to the general population. They don't know where beef comes from. They think it comes wrapped in a piece of plastic in a grocery store. They don't understand nor take the time to think about the lifestyle that produces that particular piece of meat. So as the public consciousness diminishes about the cowboy way of life, it is important that those of us who write protect the heritage and tradition and values of that way of life.
There are several things that created that way of life. First of all, I find that the people we write about are not Hollywood cowboys. Hollywood took those real life stories and sensationalized them and made them palatable to people all over the world. I did a story with a French journalist and he said, "Well, cowboys are not nice people. People in Europe refer to your president as a cowboy president. That's not a nice connotation." I said, "Why not?" He said because cowboys are not nice people. And I spent about thirty minutes trying to convince him otherwise. I don't know that I did. The Hollywood version of the cowboy is a two-fisted, hard-drinking, hard-fighting, devil-may-care human being who shoots whenever he takes a notion to.
The people that most of us write about are those hard-working, honest, God-loving, dedicated family people who are loyal to the man they ride for and who have tremendous integrity. Those are the people who live with the land and live with the livestock, and they are the most wonderful people on the face of this earth. They are well-grounded, and that attitude started before there were any fences, before there were telephones, before there was television and the only line of communication was one line rider giving the day's news that he had heard to the next guy even though it was distorted. If a guy was a liar, a thief, or a cheat, his reputation would precede him to the next cow camp and he couldn't get a job. He was welcome to lay out his bed that evening and have a hot meal but was expected to move on the next day. [The cheats and the liars] weeded themselves out of that [honest] population. All of the characteristics that we love that make a harmonious society are embellished and embodied in that particular livestock group of people. And they have passed those traits on down to their children and grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren until those same people run the ranches of the West. They know what their lifestyle is but they are not vocal about it. They don't say, hey, look at me, I'm honest. They live by that code, and they are examples for their children and the people around them. And so I think as we write and record and perform, we all try to live that kind of life and be the kind of person that we talk about in our writings. That may be a little egotistical, but I really think that that is what we all try to do.
texasmonthly.com: So how did you go about starting to write songs and stuff? Was it just something that you always did?
RS: You know, I probably started putting rhyming lines together when I was in grade school, and then by the time I got to college, I had a little band and I was writing songs and playing rodeo dances. And then I went out to Hollywood in about '65, and I spent about the next seven or eight years in the business end of the business—as a publisher, a songwriter, and a record executive, and then I started recording in '69. I have been writing songs as long as I can remember.
texasmonthly.com: Now how do you approach writing a poem? Do you have to wait for an idea to come to you?
RS: Yes I do. I don't write a little bit every day. I'm not a craftsman as such. I only capture the inspirations and put them down. I might be talking to some cowboys and riding. I go out for the spring roundup for a couple of major ranches. I'll be riding along listening to a cowboy tell a story, and he may paint a picture that I can see in my mind and I can write it, or he might just give me one line and all of the sudden I see a different picture using that one line.
texasmonthly.com: What do you think is more challenging: songwriting or cowboy poetry?
RS: Well, I think they are both challenging—to make them emotional. Any of us who write can sit down and just put lines together that are in meter and then rhyme. The first thing in any art form is original thought. You can only write so many things about an old barn. You can only describe a horse bucking so many times or a stampede or a wreck. So original thought is the single most important factor, and then meter. So in order to write a poem that somebody else will say, "Oh, that just really reminds me of my grandfather" or, "Gosh I remember a story like that," and they can put themselves in that situation—it's very difficult to make it emotional. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to take a piece of music and capsulate your entire story in just less than three minutes or so. It's difficult to do that, and it takes a lot of time. However, the two most important songs of my entire career, I wrote in less than ten minutes. Sometimes they happen that way.
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