Cowboy poets make audiences feel the pull of the open trail

PALMER, Alaska -- Jim Reader and T.J. Casey are the kind of cowboys who still rustle stock, who proclaim their country-folk status with big hats, blue jeans and calloused fingers. Their callouses aren't earned entirely through ranching -- although they say they've got land and livestock in Alberta and Montana, respectively -- but from hours picking out tunes they've crafted on the road or in a pasture watching a cow chew her cud.

Reader and Casey, known as "Shorty" and "Stretch" when they're onstage, have been performing at the Alaska State Fair this week. Between them, they've written about 3,000 songs, although, as Casey pointed out at a performance, "that's not as many as Arlo Guthrie, who wrote about 7,500. But then, he's older than us."

And so is the art of cowboy poetry. The two hosted a cowboy-poetry workshop and performance for a handful of folks who wandered into the log Colony Theatre, lured by the sound of harmonizing guitars played by 30-year veterans of the craft. Although both boast award-winning solo careers with songs that make Western-music charts such as Powersource and Roots Music Report, they recently signed a deal with a record company in Oklahoma City to make an album together. They enjoy each other's penchant for poetry that revolves around horses, hard work and home. They are, as fair worker and new fan Jennifer Martin put it, "the real deal."

"They took their hats off when they shook my hand and I thought, 'Wow, you don't see that much up here,' " said Martin, 18. "They've got the whole respect thing going."

Cowboy poetry has enjoyed a renaissance in the past decade, perhaps because anyone who has spent any time in the West can relate to simple rhymes about big sky and open roads.

The Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held each winter in Elko, Nev., began in 1985. Journalists and academics went to scoff, fell in love with the simple, evocative verses and left converts. The Western Folklife Center, which hosts the Elko gathering, sends out a "Ranch Rhymes" podcast, and there are cowboy-poet Christmases, roundups and campfires that attract hundreds of poets to the South, West and Canada each year.

A successful cowboy poet can make listeners hear the coyote wail and taste the dust of the trail. Reader and Casey do both, but they add another goal to their performances.

"A lot of our music is educational. We like to educate people about the old and new West," Reader said. "We like to call it 'edu-tainment.' "

And he was quick to differentiate between Western music and country music, the mention of which made both men shudder. Western music, Casey said, is about love for the land, about the relationship between a horse and a man. "We've got no songs about wild trucks and wild women," Reader said.

Although there aren't any range-roving cowboys anymore, as one woman in the audience pointed out, the music reminds listeners of an era that disappeared with the advent of fences, a mere 25 years after what Reader called "the golden age of the cowboy" began.

It was a short but influential time between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. No other historical figure has had such an impact on the collective imagination as the cowboy, the men told the crowd. And a big part of the cowboy's job was to sing to keep the cattle calm at night, during a storm or to stop a stampede.

The songs work pretty well on human listeners, too. As Reader and Casey launched into "Swing a Leg Up Over the Saddle," the noise filtering in from outside -- the midway's jangle, screaming kids and competing bands -- fell away so all the audience heard was harmony and all it saw was endless trail.

(Contact the writer at mwright(at)adn.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)