Monday, February 17, 2003 6:32:16 PM Joe Coluccio

Come a Ti Yi Yippie Yippie Yeah Yippie Yeah.

I admit it! I love Cowboy Songs! I ride around, CD set for stun while Powder River Jack and Kitty Lee sing Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tale or Ken Maynard paints his Home On The Range.

I have no idea why. What better time than this present to plumb the wrecks of my aesthetic dead reckonings.

I have always preferred Gene Autry to Roy Rogers. Not because Gene went off to war and Roy remained Hollywood side and reaped the name King of the Cowboys. Nope! That fact in my formative buckaroo years was not available to me. Besides the Duke also stayed in America and did so much during WWII to squelch the Nips that he died movie end with a frightful frequency. My screen favorites are Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys filling in with song and an improbable set of old jug and new swing instruments during the lighter moments of (hard to believe that moments can get much lighter than the script itself) the endless westward march of the Durango Kid. Charles Starrett.

Nope! Nor does fact that I resonated with the dapper Cisco Houston and the talkative Ramblin' Jack Elliot rather than Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger give more than just a slight compass shift to the west. The world of song does not get much better than Ramblin Jack singing Guabi Guabi in tongues.

But all this isn't really getting any nearer the roots of what some would label my malady. ...A rootin' tootin' son of a gun from Arizona, Ragtime Cowboy Joe...

Two things to get straight before we move forward one single demisemiquaver.

I am not a particular fan of Country Music. And although I do love Hank Williams and Alison Kraus is a miracle and swoon over Emmy Lou Harris. Like George Strait, revere Patsy Cline etc etc etc. A certain brand of commercial country produces a vile song like "The Baby" sitting high on the country charts by a white stetsoned long haired blue eyed devil called Blake Shelton singing about the fact that he is the baby, so his mother always called him, and he could do no wrong in her eyes and one night he was called home from afar but didn't make it in time for his mother’s expiration and then he cried just like a baby. A song like this, dependent as it is on a prurient emotion and commercially produced desire, falls squarely within the bounds of my definition of pornography.

Second, cowboy songs just aren't country music. They are, to use the tautological categorization, Cowboy Songs.

Twas in the town of Jacksboro in the spring of seventy-three,
A man by the name of Crego came steppin up to me,
Saying, "How do you do young fellow and how would you like to go
And spend one summer pleasant on the range of the buffalo?"

That is Verse One of “The Buffalo Skinners”. Needless to say, "While skinning the damned old stinkers our lives they had no show, For the Indians watched to pick us off while skinning the buffalo", the summer was not a pleasant one. Crego tells these honest working Americans lads when it is time to drag up and head back that they had been extravagant and were in debt to him so "We coaxed him and we begged him and still it was no go, We left old Crego's bones to bleach on he range of the buffalo."

This song may have been written, possibly experienced, by a guy called Buffalo Jack. It takes my breath every time I hear it. Among the best of the cowboy songs. It has all the irony and impact of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Sioux City Sioux, Across the Alley from the Alamo, Happy Trails, Back in the Saddle Again. Tumblin' Tumbleweeds, Water, San Antonio Rose, Along the Cimarron, Sante Fe Trail, Sons of the Pioneers, Riders in the Sky, The Flying W Wranglers, Hot Club of Cow Town, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Asleep at the Wheel.

Yes I envelope Western Swing Music under the dusty serape of Cowboy songs. Lovingly I sweep Tex Mex Border Music (lately called Tejano I believe) into my westward progressing wagon train.

It is music with humor and passion and rhythm, written often by common working folk, expressing longings and exposing desire. Its performance allows catharsis, much as a throbbing of a blues can rid you of darkness and despair. Hey, I guess it's just not the far from all the art that I love.

Most of the working cowhands on that wagon trail from southern Texas to Abilene sang a more salacious version of the Old “Chisholm” Trail.

I don’t define that as pornography at all.