|
Cowboys Croon and Tune at annual cowboy poetry gathering in Lewistown
January 12, 2009
Editor@montanaliving.com
From Montana Living 2002
By: Sarah Crowley
“This thing comes loose sometimes and kicks me in the lip and I do a war dance,” said a grinning Jim Duke as he snugged the metal brace holding his harmonica into place, and tuned his guitar. Then both instruments bucked into a duet as he strummed and blew at the same time. After a few bars, Duke broke into song with a voice warm as the prairie wind.
“I was snappin’ out broncs for the old Flyin’ U, at forty a month a plumb good buckaroo. When the boss comes around and he says, ‘Say my lad, you look pretty good ridin’ hosses that’s bad....” Duke crooned the rest of “Bad Brahma Bull,” a song about a cowboy whose boss suckers him into riding a bull at the rodeo.
Find these handsome doings and more at the 17th Annual Montana Cowboy Poetry Gathering, August 16 to 18 at the Yogo Inn in Lewistown. For three days the hotel rings with rangeland rhymes and western music like the ballads supplied by the 87-year-old Duke. Or maybe you’ll catch Norma Robertson rattling up a toe-tapping rhythm on her antique washboard. Call it wide-open family fun that vibrates with echoes of the Old West.
As the second-oldest cowboy poetry gathering in the United States, this whoop-up pulls 48 poets and pickers from across the States and Canada. Whether they’re professional or amateur makes no difference; these entertainers come to throw a big hoolihan loop around the audience’s heart.
On stage, they’ve traded dusty working duds for shiny boots and clean Stetsons. Even when all slicked up, performers look to be exactly what they are: ranchers and assorted agricultural folks who know the difference between a bull and a steer. They’re fair hands at “shippin’ the bull” when it comes to reciting, too. In fact, they’re so full of bull they make fun of everything including themselves.
The poet’s goal is to preserve the traditional western experience with rowdy humor and a frontier sentimentality that leaves city folks wet-eyed—either as a result of a joke or an unexpected tear-jerkin’ tale. Audiences take in everything from wild, woolly sagas of cattle drives to modern tales of women surviving the harsh reality of ranch life.
Somehow the name “cowboy poetry” doesn’t ring true at first hearing. You’d think verse and punchers must fit together about as well as a saddle on a sow. That’s what Lloyd McKenna supposed. “My initial thought was, ‘cowboys and poetry?’ To me, poetry brought to mind hippies and San Francisco and peace and beads,” says McKenna, a Lewistown poet who’s been performing statewide now for 10 years.
Cowboy poetry is nothing new. Punchers have been inventing poesy since the 1800s. Likely as not these poems were set to old folk tunes, and sung to quiet restless cows on trail drives. In the past 20 years these rural rhymes have attracted growing attention from city slickers, especially since the 1985 founding of the gathering in Elko, Nev. That once-modest experiment in folklore has swelled into an international affair attracting real cowpokes and a fair number of wannabes. According to performer Gwen Petersen, the Montana Cowboy Poetry gathering resembles Elko in its early days.
“Our gathering is smaller. There’s more camaraderie,” says Petersen, a ranch wife who helped create the Montana shebang. She was one of a handful of Montana poets who attended the initial Elko program. She and a few fellow artists staged the first Montana gathering in Big Timber in August 1986. It ran there for five years before moseying up to Lewistown.
Petersen believes the term “cowboy poetry” might spook dudes not familiar with the proceedings. “They don’t understand that what comes through in the poetry is the spirit of the West,” she says. “Nobody gets it until they go. It’s stories about people’s lives, their triumphs and tragedies. They’re real and nobody from Hollywood told us how to do it,” she adds.
To prove her point, Petersen quotes from "Out Where the West Begins" by the late Arthur Chapman:
“Where there's more of singing and less of sighing,
Where there's more of giving and less of vying,
And a man makes friends without half trying,
That's where the West begins.”
The Lewistown Art Center, the Montana Cowboy Poetry Gathering’s sponsor, hopes to draw nearly 500 visitors to this year’s blowout, which will feature not only the daytime music and poetry sessions, but also a Western art and cowboy gear show, microbrew tasting, silent auction and a special Sunday excursion aboard the Charlie Russell Chew-Choo dinner train. A Friday night dance will feature the classic country-and-western music of Sweet Grass Country with Rod Bailey.
This year’s night show headliner is best-selling humorist Baxter Black, backed by such Big Sky entertainers as Wallace McRae, Sandy Seaton, Stan Howe and Paul Zarzyski. Black will appear both Friday and Saturday nights at the Fergus High School Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are $15 apiece. Admission for poetry and music day sessions is $8 per person which allows free range to all sessions throughout the weekend.
Saddle up and ride for the 17th Annual Montana Cowboy Poetry Gathering this August. Who knows? You might just be inspired to become a “poet lariat” yourself.
For more information on the Montana Cowboy Poetry Gathering, phone (406) 538-8278, or e-mail art@lewistown.net.
|
|
