What is Cowboy Poetry?

Cowboy Poetry has been described as the perfect language coded with insider’s words, special phrases, and shared values.  It is a language which reflects the lights, smells and sounds of wide open spaces, our window to the past when solitude and loneliness were often a cowboy’s only companions.  For many cowboys, sharing tall tales and weaving verse and rhyme was their only source of entertainment while sitting around a campfire after a hard days ride.

In his book “Log of a Cowboy” Andy Adams provides one of the best descriptions of cowboy poetry and story telling we have seen.    Describing the events of a cattle drive in April 1882, he writes “We had a splendid campfire that night, of dry live oak logs, and after supper was over and the first guard had taken the herd, smoking and story telling were the order of the evening.  The camp fire is to all outdoor life what the evening fireside is to domestic life.  After the labors of the day are over, the men gather around the fire, and the social hour of the day is spent in yarning.  The stories told may run from the sublime to the ridiculous, from a true incident to a base fabrication, or from a touching bit of pathos to the most vulgar vulgarity”.

Cowboy Poetry is, in fact, a language all its own.  The perfect vehicle for a cowboy to use when articulating their joys, their sorrow, their humor and their heartbreak.  Today, as cowboys and their devotees come together at the scores of Cowboy Poetry Gatherings held throughout the West, they all share that window to the past and a commitment to preserve our Western heritage. 

The popularity of cowboy poetry has spread like wildfire across the West during the past two decades, possibly because it is a mirror of the Western way of living, an honest, no-frills lifestyle with few secrets.  In the old west, your neighbors may be few and you may not visit often, but they were always there in a heartbeat when help was needed.  A place where a man or a woman is not measured by the truck they drive or the size of the house they live in, but by their integrity, hard work and how they treat others.

One of the most beautiful things about cowboy poetry is the ever-present element of truth and a love for the land and the livestock.  While some poems are hilarious, some poems will bring a tear to your eye.  Hard luck could haunt even the most accomplished buckaroo and the poet will make you share his heartache as he describes his favorite dog that up and died, or his most valued horse that had to be put down.

The cowboy symbolizes strength, truth, justice and individuality – in short; he is a unique American symbol.  According to Western traditions, cowboys swamped yarns and composed poems and songs around their campfires, arranging easily understood ideas into rhymed stories filled with love, laughter and tears.  Cowboy poetry, which often takes a moralistic tone, is filled with passion for the land’s wide open spaces, the cowboy’s horse, and the cattle he tends.

Some say Cowboy Poetry is magic; some say it is simply real.  No matter how you describe it, it’s our one-way ticket to the past and a glorious way of life.