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20 years of cowboy poetry

By JERRY BLAIR, Free Press Associate Editor
Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:53 AM PST

ELKO - Twenty years in the making, the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering has grown in ways never envisioned by its founders.

"When the first one was held, it was never intended as an annual event. It was seen as a one-time thing," said Charlie Seemann, executive director for the Western Folklife Center, which will host the event again this year from Jan. 24-31.

From its nascent beginnings, the Gathering has become, if not an outright cultural phenomenon, at least a phenomenon of the culture that inspired it. As many as 8,000 people now attend the event that takes place the last week of January every year, pumping an estimated $7 million or more into local economy, according to Western Folklife Center estimates.

And, it's gone from a three-day regional event to one that not only entertains and enlightens folks from throughout the United States, but brings in guest artists and a growing throng of devotees from across the oceans.

The Gathering's start actually began about 25 years ago when Seemann, Hal Cannon - the Western Folklife Center's founding director - and other state folklorists from around the nation were meeting at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Seemann, who was working with the National Park Service in California, and Cannon, Utah's state folklorist at the time, had a chance meeting with Jim Griffith. Griffith, who was with the Center for Southwest Folklore for University of Arizona, and others from the West began a discussion of Western folk art and in particular cowboy poetry.

"Griffith mentioned how some of these old guys he'd run across were still doing some of these recitations," recalled Seemann, who has been a part of every Gathering with the exception of that first year.

From there, Cannon followed up and began to seek grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to create an event to memorialize the culture of the cowboy. While doing field work, he came across cowboy poets including Elko's own Waddie Mitchell, who with others like Lamoille's Jack Walther, had been performing here during summer art shows.

After five years of research, Cannon's efforts culminated in that first Cowboy Poetry Gathering in 1985.

Meg Glaser, raised on a ranch near Halleck, returned to Elko from working with the National Council for the Traditional Arts in Washington, D.C., when she was tapped to direct the Gathering. Five years later she was named artistic director of the Western Folklife Center just as it was making its permanent home in Elko.

Seemann said Elko just seemed to be a natural location for the event.

"Waddie Mitchell was here and Elko was a real cowtown," Seemann said. "People who (organizers) talked to said they didn't want to go to a city."

The rest, as they say, is history.

"When those first poets showed up that first year they were surprised that someone else was still doing it," Seemann said.

Still, despite the enthusiastic response, organizers didn't look at the Gathering as a yearly event for some time.

"For the first several years no one knew whether we wanted to do another one," Seemann said.

Locating the Gathering in Elko has been instrumental to the event's success, according to Cannon, who lived in Elko for several years before relocating to Salt Lake City, where he works from the Western Folklife Center's Utah office. Even so, murmurs have consistently arisen through the years that the event would be taken somewhere else, Cannon said.

"There always was a rumor the Western Folklife Center is going to move the Gathering to another place," he said. "No, Elko is the place. It's the place to have this. Elko has wonderful public facilities. I don't know if people really appreciate that for such a small city it has the facilities for something like this - a college, museum, a convention center."

From another standpoint, however, the Gathering's success can also be attributed to the fact the event has never been just a local happening. Cannon said from the very beginning, it was a regional event.

"That's pretty important because it attracted the press," he said. "We could say we have cowboys coming from all over."

And, it has attracted media attention including such national outlets as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, People Magazine and National Public Radio. In turn, that's helped make cowboy poets and writers like Baxter Black practically household names.

But, more than that, it's given voice to the entire subculture of the cowboy and the ranching life in a whole host of ways that has continued to evolve since 1985.

"The poets always come up with new perspectives so the content always challenge," Cannon said. "Now, some of the strongest poetry is coming from women writing poetry. It was more of a male event at first. It's a lot bigger, not just poetry, but music, dance and art. It's much more diverse than it was to start with."

The Gathering also led to something of an unexpected connection to other cultures that celebrate the rural lifestyle and the horse. One of the biggest draws at the event in recent years has been the inclusion of Australian poets.

"I got very interested in the Bush poetry of Australia, found it to be so much like American cowboy poetry," Cannon said. "That was our first real successful international exchange. That's been a great one."

The 60 featured poets, musicians and other performers at this year's Gathering will include a group of artists and horsemen from Mongolia, who will travel to Elko to share their music, songs and stories of the nomadic lifestyle on the Asian steppe.

"For a lot of people that's a stretch - but I think it will be an interesting experiment bringing these horse folk together," Cannon said.

During the past two decades, the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - which officially got its name through an act of Congress - also has inspired numerous spin-offs around the country.

"It's really created a renaissance ... in ranching culture in general," Seemann said. "There are hundreds of other (events) taking place, inspiring people to write about their experiences, producing CDs, books, and working in the material crafts, saddlemaking, silver working."

To mark the milestone of the 20th Gathering, event organizers will reunite a number of folks who took part in the first one, while also remembering some of the participants who were there in 1985 but have since passed on.

Jack Walther, who was there at the beginning, will be one of the featured poets during the 20th Gathering. Walther said he was surprised to find such an enthusiastic response to cowboy poetry.

"I still am," he said, speaking from his Lamoille ranch. "It was something I've seen all my life on ranches, around camps. I was surprised to see people come across the oceans and across the U.S. (to the Gathering). I thought that it would last one time."

Walther said the reason for its draw among cowboys and ranchers is the informality of the event.

"I think for a lot of people, you can come and see old friends. You can talk to pretty much anybody. Good people come every year, they're always glad to see each other," he said.

As far as the event's popularity among general audiences, Walther sees it as a nostalgia for a time gone.

"It brings them back to their roots," he said. "People are not associated with it anymore. It brings them back to what their ancestors were."

Walther says he enjoys cowboy poetry for the way it tells a story. Some of the newer forms, however, don't sit as well with the old traditionalist.

"I don't understand this non-rhyming, don't relate to it," he said.

For his part, Walther said as a younger man he never thought that the rhyming he and other cowhands did sitting around a fire was something for public consumption. In fact, the lines he most readily remembered during those years weren't meant at all for more polite company.

"The poems I would hear at the bunkhouse were not exactly the ones I could repeat," he admitted.

While not everything about the authentic home on the range makes it onto the stage, the Gathering does attempt to stay as authentic as possible to the cowboy lifestyle.

Knowing that it's out there, that this way of life continues to exist and has its own expressive voice in the form of poetry and music is what keeps people coming back each year, according to Cannon.

"The majority of people in this country now live in urban settings," he said. "I think there is such curiosity about rural America. A real curiosity about cowboys, 'Do they really still exist?'"

Seemann agrees.

"It's a real phenomenon," Seemann said. "We're already thinking ahead to the 25th anniversary, a quarter century. Every year is an adventure. Every year we find new people who are carrying on the traditions. It's very rewarding to see it all happen."

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