The Three Rs: Ridin’, Rustlin’ and Rhymin’ : Cowboys: It’s poem, poem on the range as Western poets and singers mosey into Sunday’s 30th Annual Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest.

Don’t ever ask an old cowboy--or a cowboy-at-heart--too much about cowboy poetry and song. He’s apt to choke right up, like Lou Schubert. Or like Mike Mahaney, who paused to collect himself while reciting a sample of the deceptively spare verses of the anonymous cowboy classic, “Blood on the Saddle”:

There was blood on the saddle

There was blood on the ground

And a great big puddle of blood all around.

A cowboy lay in it, all bloody and red

For his horse had fallen on him

And crushed in his head . . .

Choked up or not, Mahaney and Schubert and a number of other Wild West wordsmiths will be singing and reciting, yodeling and ti-yi-yippee -ing cowboy tales Sunday at the 30th Annual Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura--as part of the contest’s first-ever “Cowboy Poetry and Storytelling” segment.

Are Mahaney and Schubert cowboys? No. Fifty-year-old Mahaney is a lifelong folk singer (and former host of KCSN’s cowboy program, “Trail Mix”) currently working in telemarketing for KCET television. Schubert is a 61-year-old, Boston-born former engineer and salesman (and former contest organizer) whose wrangling experience is confined to having been social director for dude ranches in Arizona and New Mexico.

Are they cowboys at heart? Sure as a bronco bucks. You can see it in their misty eyes, hear it in their quavering voices, when they talk about how they became interested in Western folklore--or when they recite such famous pieces of verse as “The Strawberry Roan,” by cowboy poet Curley Fletcher, or sing cowboy songs that have crossed over into mainstream tastes, like “Don’t Fence Me In,” or those that haven’t, like “The Old Chisholm Trail.”

“ ‘The Old Chisholm Trail’ is my speciality,” said Schubert from his Malibu Canyon home. “It probably has millions of verses. Some of them you only do in men’s company, and of course, I won’t do any that are inappropriate at the contest. And some are really written for children, and others for families.”

Indeed, “Chisholm” has as many verses as there were cowboys to make them up. Schubert collected several hundred during years of travel around the country, interviewing old cowboys and other guardians of Old West memories, and will perform as many as 70 verses at the contest.

“It’s both a poem and a song,” said Schubert, now a partner in an equestrian center-building company who discovered his love for the West while reading Zane Grey novels as a child. “I start it off by singing and yodeling, and then I play the harmonica, then I read some verses from various books, then I play Autoharp and sing some more. And then ,” he added, laughing, “I play my mandolin. It takes a hell of a long time to get through the whole thing.”

“Chisholm” tells several stories at once, and Schubert seems emotionally involved with each of them. His baritone voice arches and growls dramatically and spontaneously as he sings; he ti-yi-yippees like it really means something. A few of his favorite stanzas:

“Come along boys, and listen to my tale

Tell you all my troubles on the old Chisholm Trail

Come a ti-yi-yippee, come a ti-yi-yay

Come-a-ti-yi-yippee-yippee-yay

Started down the trail on October twenty-third,

Started down the trail with the Barracks herd

Ten-dollar hat, forty-dollar saddle

Best damn cowboy that ever been straddled

“Most of these songs go back to probably the 1840s and 1850s,” said the lanky Mahaney, who lives a cow-chip toss from the Burbank Equestrian Center, and a short gallop from the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum (whose namesake first inspired Mahaney’s interest in Western lore at Saturday matinees long ago.) “Some of the songs--their meters and melodies--can be traced to Irish and Welsh tunes.”

And the nonsense words like “ti-yi-yippee,” which aren’t really so nonsensical, have similar roots. Schubert said:

“There’s a lady that teaches folklore at night school in Culver City, and she took a lot of these nonsense verses--like a ‘donny donny oogle and a bonnie bonnie way’ . . . and explained to me that it actually meant something in Gaelic, and showed how some of these things eventually made their way to American folk songs. They eventually lost their meaning for the singers, but they still sounded good.”

Mahaney, who will host the cowboy segment, blew the lid off the pastoral, guitar-cradling “singing cowboy” stereotype as depicted in movies. Yes, wranglers did sing--but no, they did not strum guitars and croon like Gene Autry or the Sons of the Pioneers. The music was often a cappella , and when it wasn’t, the instruments of choice were the fiddle and harmonica. The songs were often far simpler than the fare that Autry warbled.

“I know it’s a genre that’s been criticized by academia,” said Mahaney. “Most of the poetry and song consists of four-line stanzas that rhyme. It’s very easy to listen to and understand--pretty simple--and it should be. It’s all really about a lost way of life, or a way of life that is struggling to be preserved.”

Or, perhaps it’s more correct to say, a mythified way of life?

“Maybe it is more the myth that I love than reality--you know, at least the myth of simple living, truth and honesty, the white hat, friendship and those kind of things,” said Mahaney, whose home is in a neighborhood known as “River Bottom” that used to house movie cowboys and their ponies in the ‘30s and ‘40s. “Whether they really existed in the West or were the invention of Ned Buntline (creator of the Buffalo Bill Cody dime novel, forerunner of paperback); whether they were from the imagination of a writer or really existed, I don’t know. But I’ve seen so damn much film about the cowboy that it’s left me with definitely a love of the myth.”

The cowboy theme of the contest was Schubert’s idea--the result of a suggestion by contest director Mary Ellen Clark to add a “storytelling” segment. Schubert quickly suggested calling Mahaney, and other volunteers were rounded up, including storyteller/poet Greg McCarty, David Bouren, Beryl Black, Dorin Kayser, Reine River and Christina Egrr. But reading is not limited to special guests. Audience members will be invited on stage to spin tales of the “lone prairie,” and some of the stories are likely to be pretty authentic.

“There are two or three old cowboys who have come every year to sing songs in the general competition, and we’ll undoubtedly get some of those guys to come over and talk and tell cowboy tales,” said Schubert.

What? You mean, really working cowboys? Didn’t know there were any left. . . .

“They’re retired now,” he said, “because they have too many broken bones or too many aches, or they found there was more money in being a Hollywood cowboy than a real one. There’s one young guy, well, he’s young compared to me--he’s 42--and he’s a tremendous showman. He’s a lot like some of these Will Rogers-type people who were humorists. When he gets up and does a song, it’s really not a song at all; it’s an act.”

Schubert’s own act is well-tested. In a lifetime’s journeys around the world, the former dude-rancher (an accomplished horseman in both English and Western riding styles) always toted his guitar. Despite the fact that he courteously made a point of singing in the language appropriate for whichever country he happened to find himself in, in each case, Schubert said, “the thing everybody loved was my cowboy songs and yodeling. It’s a universal thing.”

And a thing that he is still at a loss to explain the allure of. When asked that question most dreaded by lovers of cowboy lore and history, “What do you love about the songs and poems?” Lou Schubert could barely get the answer out:

“Well, you know there’s two things that are . . . most beautiful. . . . Sorry. . . . Gettin’ emotional, here. . . . Well, there’s the humor. The humor’s . . . beautiful. . . . Sort of a combination of the tragedy and humor, I guess . . . and the loneliness. . . .”

Come along boys, and listen to my tale

Tell you all my troubles on the old Chisholm Trail

Come a ti-yi-yippee, come-a-ti-yi-ya

Come-a-ti-yi-yippee-yippee-yay...”

Contest at the Ranch The 30th annual Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest, which runs from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura, will feature 100 entrants who will sing or play fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin or special instruments.

The event, which in recent years has hop-scotched around Southern California collegiate athletic fields, also will include folk dancing and crafts such as ceramics, needlework, wood carving, jewelry making, weaving, and leather work.

Singing and Western poetry reading will begin at noon. Non-contestants are encouraged to bring instruments for jam sessions.

To get to the ranch, take the Ventura Freeway west to the Kanan Road exit. Go south on Kanan to Cornell Road. Turn left and veer to the right for 2 1/2 miles to the ranch. Parking is free. Admission is $5, $2 for youngsters 12 to 17 and seniors over 65, free for children under 12. For information, call (818) 594-1742.