Introducing Cowboy Poets - Les Buffham & Earl Wayne (Duke) Davis

Ropin' and Rhymin':

Literature: Good cowboy poetry is like a good chew of tobacco--you can sink your teeth into it. Two Southland poets capture the bittersweet essence of a dying trade.

http://articles.latimes.com/1993-09-15/local/me-35321_1_most-cowboy-poetry

by Johnathan Gaw

Times Staff Writer

September 15, 1993

Cowboy Poet Les Buffham

In his cramped and cluttered Castaic trailer, Les Buffham employs an old Hills Brothers can to make a mild "buckaroo brew"--coffee, that is--and takes sugar in it, something he concedes is for sheepherders, not real cowboys.

But his coffee pretty much describes the 50-year-old trucker: sweet and mild.

Cowboy Poet Duke Davis

On the other side of the Santa Clarita Valley, the spurs worn by Earl Wayne (Duke) Davis ring out as he gives a tour of his Canyon Country townhome with its cow skull and paintings of American Indian life.

With saliva gathering in his mouth from the clump of tobacco chew in his cheek, Davis spits into a yellow plastic container as he pets his dog, Blue, and talks about a favorite pastime, one that he and Buffham share.

They write poetry. Cowboy poetry, of course.

The two are the best-known practitioners of the prose in Los Angeles County, and Buffham, some say, is among the best in the nation. The city of Santa Clarita recently announced plans to host a three-day festival in March dedicated to the poetry and music of the vaqueros , as a way to explore the area's Western roots. Buffham and Davis intend to be there.

"I never thought of myself as being a cowboy; I was just a kid who grew up on a ranch," said Buffham, a native of Craig, Colo., whose family still runs cattle there. "Now, being a cowboy is sort of a prestigious thing."

Prestigious, maybe, but certainly nothing from which one could make a good living. Buffham worked the ranches in Colorado until he needed money, at which point he took up trucking. For a while last year, he lived in Santa Clarita proper, but he couldn't take the noise.

"It was pure hell," Buffham said, "what with the dogs yappin' and the cars going by--I couldn't do anything."

Now, he drives a truck for local oil companies digging in the area's hills and canyons.

Is a cowboy no longer a cowboy
When he's forced to buck hay or drive truck?
Or when he's laid up wrapped in plaster
From a run of real bad luck?
Is it when he's had to sell his old home place
Cause his joints are stiff and snow rests on his head.
Well I'm thinkin' he's no longer a cowboy
Only when he's dead.

Buffham hopes someday to travel around the country and interview the remaining cowpunchers to immortalize their stories.

"The old cowboy way of life is passing," he noted. "There ain't many people left doing it, and the ones who are doing it ain't doing it the way they used to."

Buffham himself has done some cowboying in his time, as evidenced by his misshapen nose, the legacy of a horse ride gone awry.

"I was just trying her out for a friend of mine and I got a little too cocky," he said, swaying in a metal rocking chair. "She threw me and I landed on my face, cricked my head and broke my nose."

Davis, too, has won his stripes as a cowboy.

The 45-year-old native of Schertz, Texas, spends two-thirds of his year with his country-Western music band Duke Davis and Buckshot, and the rest working ranches around Santa Ynez, doing roundups and brandings during the calving season.

"Poetry is just something that goes hand in hand with the cowboy world," said Davis, petting his prized horse Choppo, named for a song about the ideal steed.

He has written of growing up dreaming of riding "every snuffy old pony" and his poetry sticks close to well-worn features of life on the trail. Titles of his pieces include "Time to Ride," "It's Good to Be Alive," "My Team Ropin' Pardner" and "The Last Coyote."

Buffham, in contrast, muses as well about the melancholy that comes as the cowboy's domain is overrun by modernization. And, since the best of cowboy poetry is based on true-life experiences, not all carries storybook themes--or endings.

In one of Buffham's poems, "Lonnie's Blue Heeler," the cowboy of the title accidentally shoots his dog while aiming a warning shot between the dog and a heifer:

Lonnie turned around with a plumb-dumbfounded look

Jake, he's just looking down, kicking at the sand.

Lonnie's standing there with his mouth dropped open,

That smoking rifle in his hand.

Jake cleared his throat and said:

"I guess I'd oughtta told you since I dropped it on the sight?

That old gun has been a shootin' just a little to the right."

Such verse is a major part of Western folklore, said David Stanley, an English professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

"Cowboy poetry, instead of emphasizing individual forms of expression and feeling, expresses the norms of a group, and yet at the same time expresses the artistic talent of the individual," Stanley said. "This is partly because cowboy life is out of necessity, and also out of preference, a very group-focused occupation."

Most cowboy poetry, Stanley said, is very traditional in form, even old-fashioned, tending to rhyme and have a regular rhythm, most written in ballad form. But that is changing, just as cowboy life is changing, Stanley said.

"We are seeing more and more free verse and other modern forms in cowboy poetry, and we're also seeing a lot of attention to contemporary issues, such as the plight of Vietnam vets," he said.

The first published cowboy poetry, Stanley said, dates to the 1890s, but the craft probably goes back several more decades, with much of the early poetry borrowing heavily from sailor poetry.

"Cowboy poetry is not now, and has never been, a simple form that praises good horses and laments fallen comrades," said Stanley, who is editing a book of essays on cowboy prose. "There has always been much more variety, and the play of language within the poetry is incredibly complex and very often tremendously witty."

Among today's cowboy lyricists, said Rudy Gonzales, publisher of American Cowboy Poet magazine, Buffham is one of the best.

"He's won the respect and admiration of cowboy poets wherever he has gone," said Gonzales, who started the 20,000 circulation magazine in 1988. "Cowboy poetry, when it is done properly, portrays the cowboy heart and experience, and Les Buffham does it right."

But in a poem called "The Hat," about his start as a cowboy, Buffham wonders why anyone pursues the hard toil of the ranch.

There were lots of long hard winters

Sorting cows and pitching hay.

Wondering why I picked this life

Crossed my mind most every day.

There were salt to pack and springs to clean

Setting posts and stretching wire,

And it seemed it took a cord of wood

For fifteen minutes of fire.

Cowboy Poetry in Elko, Nevada

Poem On The Range

Cowboy Poets Gather In Nevada To Paint The West With Words,

Happy To Tell Of Life In The Saddle At The Drop Of A Stetson

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19940320&slug=1901062

by Mike Nichols

Universal Press Syndicate

March 20, 1994

Just after sunrise on the Big Springs Ranch in northeastern Nevada, saddle leather creaked, spurs jingled, coyotes yipped. The sounds of the West. Then one more sound of the West was heard - a cowboy reciting poetry:

"There ain't no squall the banshee makes will make your neck hair rise,

Like that there bovine blood call as it echoes to the skies . . ."

The cowboy was Larry Schutte; the poetry was "Cowpen Moo-sic," a Western classic written by S. Omar Barker.

Schutte, 39, wore fringed chaps, a black cowboy hat and a blue neckerchief as he moved cattle in a pasture of rye. He, his horse and his dog worked in unspoken synchronization. As the herd moved, it seemed to generate its own weather system, raising a cloud of dust and the rumble of thunder.

Schutte tends to 1,000 head of cattle. He also tends to two children, makes horsehair ropes by hand and is a poet, singer, and musician in his own right. All that left him with little time to get into the town of Elko, Nevada, just 75 miles away, where more - much more - poetry was being recited.

For five days in January the rhyme was the reason as more than 40 cowboys recited and more than 8,000 fans listened during Elko's 10th annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

The term "cowboy poet" might conjure up a conflicting image: the strong, silent type and the sensitive, expressive type - an unlikely cross-breed of John Wayne and John Keats. But, indeed, most poets at Elko were, like Schutte, working cowboys.

They were genuine crack-of-dawnin', cigarette-rollin', dust-eatin', manure-troddin', sweatband-stainin', finger-freezin' wranglers who rope and ride, even if the hoofbeats of the cattle drives have been replaced by the whine of 18-wheelers hauling herds on asphalt "trails."

...And they recite at the drop of a Stetson.

At Elko they versified about bravery and tragedy, about uncanny cowhands, recalcitrant mules and "wrecks" (accidents on horseback). Their poems about practical jokes and tall tales evoked laughter from the audience; their poems about having to shoot a faithful horse brought tears.

Elko's Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held in winter when ranch duties slacken, is the oldest and biggest of its kind. But more than 150 other such gatherings are held throughout the year. Some include barbecues, others offer rodeos and collectible shows, still others conduct workshops where people can learn how to braid rawhide, engrave silver or prepare roundup recipes for hungry hands.

Elko featured all that and more, including scholarly panel discussions on ranching issues and a "Gathering of Gear" exhibit and auction that displayed the bridles and bits, quirts (short braided whips), bosals (bitless nose bands) and mecates (horsehair ropes) that are essential to a cowboy's day at the office.

And like most cowboy poetry gatherings it was family-oriented, with PG-rated language and special activities for children such as a puppet show, a poetry session for cowboys under 18, and a mechanical steer that young wranglers could try their hand at lassoing.

A Western Woodstock

But whatever its program, a cowboy poetry gathering is a kind of Western Woodstock, a celebration of Western culture and the words and music that express it. Each gathering presents a picture of the West as cowboy poets paint with words just as deftly as the classic Western artist Frederic Remington did with colors.

Their oral landscape reminds listeners that although prosaically the West is where hamburgers come from, more romantically the West is where America's original heroes - cowboys - come from.

These cowboys ride across a West that is as varied as it is vast, a West where ranches with names like the Pitchfork, the Four Sixes and the Circle-R hunker in mountain valleys or sprawl over plains near small towns with names like Hereford, High River and Recluse.

It is a West where for every city the size of Los Angeles, Calif., there are a thousand the size of Los Angeles, Texas (population 150). In fact, the combined population of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah is less than that of New York City.

Elko is typical of the Western small town - its main drag, Idaho Street, serves as a linear cornucopia of souvenir shops, boot shops, tack stores, steak restaurants, motels, mini-malls, and, this being Nevada, wedding chapels and casinos.

Demographically, Elko is a town of 27,000, a number swelled by a boom in gold mining in the area. And being rated No. 1 in the book "The 100 Best Small Towns in America" in 1993 didn't hurt, either.

Geographically, Elko is a notch on Interstate 80, which stretches like a belt 2,900 miles from New Jersey to San Francisco. During the poetry gathering, travelers came from both ends to learn about real cowboys.

One traveler, Randy Hale of New York City, learned that "the biggest problem to them is losing their ranches. The biggest problems from a New York point of view are drugs and guns and kids dropping out of school. . . . Their way of life here is completely different from mine. And some of these people are darned good poets."

Those darned good poets spent most of their time in Elko at the Convention Center. Featured poets recited in the auditorium, sitting on the stage in a row like birds on a wire. Other poets recited in three meeting halls during sessions that were open to anyone.

Some were relaxed veterans; some were nervous newcomers, standing banjo-eyed behind the podium and gripping the microphone tightly like a saddle horn. Poems ranged from classics to original works. Some were polished, some were ragged, all were sincere.

There were no winners or losers. Elko was just a forum for self-expression. If a cowboy forgot the words of a well-known classic he was reciting, a sympathetic voice in the audience likely would prime his poetic pump by calling out the next line.

Cowgirl Poets

Elko was a forum for cowgirl poets, too. Western writer and editor Teresa Jordan said, "Ranch women's writing has exploded in the last four or five years."

One cowgirl poet, Georgie Sicking of Nevada, has been a rancher most of her life (when she was 19, she was late to her wedding because she was roping wild burros). She is 72 now, and time, like prairie rain, has washed soft ravines in her face. Back when she decided to become a cowgirl, she was discouraged by less-liberated women. She wrote of those days:

"When I was young and foolish, the women said to me,

Take off those spurs and comb your hair if a lady you would be.

Take off that Levi jumper, put up those batwing chaps,

Put on a little makeup and we can get a date for you, perhaps' ...."

But she stayed in the saddle and eventually got her own ranch. "I do all the work myself except for plowing and haying. And neighbors help me with the branding."

Amid all the poetry, occasionally was heard a discouraging word. Cowboys, ever at the mercy of the elements, lately feel buffeted by winds from Washington, D.C. Much of the land in the West is public, its use regulated by the federal Bureau of Land Management under Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Many ranchers graze their cattle on more public than private land. They pay a grazing fee, but fear fee increases and worry about land-use restrictions that result from recreational and ecological considerations.

These changes leach out into the poetry. Baxter Black of Colorado wrote:

"If you've been losing sleep at night about the public land,

Yer not alone. We're all concerned with changes wrought by man.

. . . A wall! We need a giant wall to hold the riffraff back,

But since they own the public lands, we'll prob'ly catch some flak."

And there's one more change wrought by man. The growing interest in cowboy poetry has elevated it to the status of a business. At gatherings such as Elko's, dozens of books and tapes of poetry are sold. A few poets even make a living at it.

Waddie Mitchell of Nevada, for example, has recited on "The Tonight Show" and makes about 120 public appearances a year. He hopes to earn enough money to buy a ranch so that he can return to "buckarooing.

Cowboy poetry has even evolved to the point that these sagebrush literati sit in two camps: traditional and free verse. Hal Cannon, a founder of the Elko gathering, said of traditional verse, "You can trace cowboy poetry pretty directly back to England, to the old ballad form of poetry."

Traditional cowboy poetry is easily understood. It rhymes. It often has a four-beat cadence, like the gait of a horse.

Nevada cowboy Rod McQueary writes some free verse. When he recites, his words are spaced as regularly as fence posts:

"When they ask of Life, what will I say?

Can I describe time that swirls,

With fickle castanets,

And disappears?

A shrinking, self-swallowing serpent? ..."

But whether the form is traditional or free verse, a cowboy cannot live by poetry alone. He must have music. So at night in Elko, after the day's poetry sessions had ended, more sounds of the West were heard.

A few blocks down Idaho Street from the Convention Center, at the Stockmen's Motel, cowboys and cowgirls gathered in a meeting hall to listen to jam sessions as pickers and singers sat in circles with guitar, fiddle and mouth harp. They played "Git Along, Little Dogies," "Red River Valley" and "The Streets of Laredo." There were waltzes, ballads and square dance tunes.

By 3 a.m., cowboys and cowgirls began to leave the Stockmen's in twos and threes and fours. On Idaho Street a few cars and pickups cruised. A horn honked. From within one car the bass of the stereo thumped like a heart.

And then amid these city sounds came once again the sound of the West: A cowboy meandered through the Stockmen's parking lot repeating aloud lines recited earlier in the night by poet Buck Ramsey:

"I'll live in time with horse hoof falling;

I'll listen well and hear the calling,

The earth, my mother, bids to me,

Though I will still ride wild and free . . ."

More Information

http://www.westernfolklife.org/National-Cowboy-Poetry-Gathering-General-Info/national-cowboy-poetry-gathering-home-page.html

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