Poem on the Range : * Baxter Black and other literary cowboys will gather in Santa Clarita for a festival celebrating their art.

Baxter Black rushed to the phone and caught his breath as he answered the call.

“We found the dog,” he said. “He’d slipped into the barn. Spent the better part of two days in there. We’d been pouring a little cement, you see, patching some holes outside the barn where the colt had kicked in. Then the dog disappeared. . . . Thought he’d been either shot at or run over.”

At his home in Brighton, Colo., northeast of Denver, where his thriving Coyote Cowboy Co. is headquartered, Black set time aside from his chores to discuss his appearance tonight at the Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry, Music and Film Festival. But the style of his chat was much like his pieces for public radio.

Black, who has been called the poet laureate of the lariat, is a modern-day Will Rogers and the dean of the cowboy bards. At his 20-acre site, which Black calls his “place,” he keeps livestock (cows, horses), fattens them up and sells them later. When he buys them, they are called “killers” because if he didn’t buy them, they’d go to slaughter. (He has agriculture interests in Texas and New Mexico, but the Colorado ranch is not his main for-profit operation.)

He writes weekly columns, now in 109 U.S. and Canadian newspapers; shoots hourlong video specials for 140 public television stations; writes and self-publishes books (more than 150,000 sold at last count), and records 3-minute weekly shows, laden with humorous commentary, for use by about 140 stations, including National Public Radio. He also averages 100 appearances a year, and tonight, who knows what Black will draw from when he opens the first Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry, Music and Film Festival to be held at Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio.

“I don’t have a plan, but I have a lot of material,” Black said, “and we won’t know until we get there if we’ve drawn a bunch of farmers or people who are suburbanites who just like cowboys.

“Santa Clarita will be hard to judge. When I speak in Chino or Santa Maria or Brawley, it’s different. There you have your vegetable growers and cattle-feeders. But now, Santa Clarita might be a little more like Evansville, Ind. You don’t tell the same stories that would be inside jokes in Fresno among the cow business.”

Originally budgeted at $83,000, the event had been set at Hart High School until the Jan. 17 earthquake damaged the school auditorium. But when the city, the festival’s sponsor, requested a $13,000 federal grant, many citizens opposed having the event at all, since they felt their tax dollars could be better used for the homeless and other matters more pressing than a cowboy festival.

Nevertheless, the festival is on for three days. Planners hope to draw buckaroos from throughout California and the West, the way the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., does every January. In fact, city officials modeled this weekend’s program on Elko’s gathering, after attending it last year.

“We tried to draw from the best-known, best-loved performers,” event coordinator Cecilia Burda said, “the major artists from all over the country on the cowboy poetry circuit.”

Black, 49, has attended every Elko gathering since 1983.

There’s a distinct difference, he says, between a cowboy poetry show and a cowboy poetry gathering.

“A gathering is three guys telling each other stories. It’s sort of based on reality. It doesn’t require a ticket and it’s held at a local high school. Someone might pick out a theme and the audience wanders from room to room. I have always thought of Elko as a gathering,” Black said.

“A show is when someone wants a good crowd and I’m supposed to draw a good crowd. I’m not Orson Welles reading to a bunch of blue-haired people in the garden, though. My background is medical, and as a former veterinarian, well, my subjects are sort of cow-y.”

Black often gets asked to draw from his books of poetry, “The Vegetarian’s Guide to the Cowboy” and “The Cowboy’s Guide to Vegetarians.” An excerpt:

I had planted a garden last April

And lovingly sang it a ballad .

But later in June beneath a full moon

I, forgive me, I wanted a salad!

When he appears in readings, Black is more widely identified with his opinion columns in newspapers such as the Florida Cattleman in Kissimmee, Fla., or the Midwest Marketer in Bloomfield, Iowa, than he is with his appearances on public TV or radio.

“There’s virtually no crossover between people who hear me on NPR and people who know me as an agricultural columnist,” he said, referring to “On the Edge of Common Sense,” the agribusiness column he describes as “mostly humorous, occasionally political, accidentally informative.” (Black writes about the values and issues affecting cowboys, farmers and ranchers. Recent subjects include the Bureau of Land Management, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and the wearing of furs.)

“Quite often where I speak, people don’t get public radio. But then I might go to a city where 70% of the audience listens to NPR. For some reason, there are pockets of NPR people--like smokers in the world.”

Listeners familiar with Black’s voice who imagine a gray, grizzled, hefty Wilford Brimley look-alike will be in for quite a surprise when he steps up to the microphone. He is rangy, lean and trim, with a bushy mustache and long sideburns.

“Baxter is the classic-looking cowboy,” said singer and songwriter Michael Martin Murphey, who, much like Black, is a rancher. Murphey lives in New Mexico and will bring his band to the festival for two shows Saturday. “He sure pleases the ladies. But then it’s difficult to be paunchy if you do a lot of riding and ranch work.”

LIAISON: WHERE AND WHEN

What: Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry, Music and Film Festival.

Locations: Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio, 24715 Newhall Ave., and the Plaza Theater, 23710 Lyons Ave., Newhall.

Poetry readings: “An Evening With Baxter Black” at 8 tonight; open sessions from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday, all at Melody Ranch.

Music: Michael Martin Murphey concert at 7 and 9 p.m. Saturday; “Cowboy Jubilee” with Waddie Mitchell, Don Edwards, Sons of the San Joaquin at 2 p.m. Sunday, all at Melody Ranch.

Films: Starting today at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 12:30 p.m., all at Plaza Theater.

Films: John Wayne in “The Searchers” and “Angel and the Badman” today at 7:30 p.m.; Roy Rogers in “Texas Legionnaires” and Gene Autry in “The Gene Autry Show” at 11:30 a.m., John Wayne in “Red River” at 1:30 p.m.; Gary Cooper in “High Noon” at 3:45 p.m., Lee Marvin in “Monte Walsh” at 5:30 p.m., Alan Ladd in “Shane” at 7:30 p.m. and John Wayne in “The Shootist” at 10 p.m. Saturday; “Shane” and “The Gene Autry Show” at 12:30 p.m. Sunday.

Poets: Gwen Petersen, Ed Brown, Linda Hussa Smith, John Dofflemeyer, Jesse Smith, Sue Wallis, Ross Knox, Rod McQueary and Randy Rieman, all at Melody Ranch.

Arts and crafts: Works including hand-crafted leather and silver items by 75 exhibitors from 6 to 9 p.m. today; from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday; from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday, all at Melody Ranch.

Tickets: Baxter Black, $12; Michael Martin Murphey, $15; Cowboy Poetry, $10; “Cowboy Jubilee,” $15. Weekend passes for all poetry and music, $50.

Parking: Shuttle service to the ranch from Hart High School lot, 24825 Newhall Ave.

Call: (805) 286-4022.