ON THE TRAIL OF COWBOY POETRY

One night in a suite at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, after a March of Dimes fund-raiser honoring a Denver Post columnist, the late Red Fenwick, Slim Pickens recited a long and supremely bawdy poem called “The Cowboy.”

Bawdy is a euphemism. It was filthy. But it was also amazingly inventive, blissfully funny and so knowledgeably insulting that only a man who had been a working cowboy might fully appreciate just how deadly accurate some of the sallies were.

Pickens, a rodeo clown before he found fame in the movies, said he’d heard it from the author, an old-time ranch hand who used to recite it in cow country saloons for the price of a drink. Pickens had had him say it again and again, until Pickens had it memorized. (It must have run 20 minutes.)

I swore I’d get together with Pickens back in California and write it down or record it, and he was agreeable. But I kept tripping over deadlines and other duties, as you do, and I waited too long. Pickens, a thoughtful and sensitive actor beneath the clownish roles he often played--the enduring image is of him wahooing into space atop the atom bomb at the end of “Dr. Strangelove”--died at the end of 1983.

But I have to hope that the poem exists someplace, and I expect it does. The famous cowboy pals who were his audience that night in the Brown knew parts of it and chanted along with him. And dedicated folklorists have been on the trail of cowboy poems and songs since the turn of the century.

Howard Thorp’s “Songs of the Cowboys” appeared in 1908, John Lomax’s “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads” in 1910. Last year the adventurous Western publisher, Gibbs M. Smith of Layton, Utah, brought out “Cowboy Poems: A Gathering,” edited and introduced by Hal Cannon, in a compact size that will fit in the pocket of a blue jeans jacket (Gibbs M. Smith, Box 667, Layton, UT 84041, $9.95, 201 pp.).

The Pickens poem isn’t there. As Jim Murray said of a roast years ago, you not only couldn’t print it, you couldn’t tell it to a truck driver. In these more tolerant days, you could print it--although you might want to keep it on a high shelf.

But the cowboy poetry, some old, most current, some anonymous, is tonic as mountain air on a spring morning. You don’t have to pry out the meaning with an electron microscope or a Ouija board and the rhythms sweep you along as decisively as a parade.

The cowboy as a breed may be diminishing, may spend as much time with a steering wheel as with a bridle, may have quit smoking like everybody else. But he still exists. The authors in this collection, as Cannon says in his brief, affectionate notes, are farmers, ranchers and working cowhands, and it’s not an all-male preserve, either.

Linda Ash, an Oregon woman, writes knowingly about the struggles to keep calves alive; Georgia Sicking works a Nevada ranch and talks proudly about becoming a top cowhand.

There are a lot of ballad-like narratives, tales of barroom brawls and floods and storms and rodeos with broncs that wouldn’t be broken, and of the West that was and the West that is. Most of the authors’ names carry no resonances outside their own cowboy country. But their poems carry the ring of truth, the hard, wry honesty of life as they live it and, even more, as they feel it.

There is something about the big sky and living close to the elements of sun, wind, rain, birth, danger and death that invites the mystical, a sense of Otherness, of Heaven and Hell and a kind of Great Score Settling in the Beyond, where earthly chores are rewarded and earthly rottennesses atoned for.

The mysticism, or the pantheism--the awareness of God in Nature--is straight and simple in the poems, heartfelt but not profound, and it’s often pretty funny, as in Wallace McRae’s “Reincarnation,” in which a cowboy completes a kind of ecocycle, and is thought not to have changed much.

The Western movie has a hard time making a comeback, which seems the sadder when, as Cannon remarks in his introduction, the life can still be found, not much changed, from a long time ago. “The oral tradition of recited poetry,” Cannon says, “has sustained itself almost exclusively in ranching communities, where poems have sometimes appeared in weeklies and rural interest magazines, but are mostly created--and passed around--at the campfire, in the bunkhouse and on horseback.” And, you might add, in Denver hotel suites.

It’s hard not to respond to the galloping gait and the invincible rhymes of the cowboy poetry, particularly in the ballad form, as in an anonymous work called “Silver Bells and Golden Spurs,” which notes the passage of time:

The Lucky Star is deserted, too,

All littered with sand and straw,

Where the laughter rang and the dandy’s gang

Once drank to his lightning draw.

For times do change, of course, and although the poems mostly celebrate the life as it is, there are laments for what was, none more to the point than “The Dying Times” by Ross Knox (“has cowboyed in nine states”):

But for me and my partner and a few folks I know

It’d sure enough be just fine

If they’d invent a machine like I seen on T.V.

That would turn back the pages of time.