For Cowboy Poets, the Big Roundup : Entertainment: Tenderfoots converge for a festival of verse, music and film. Performers note a new upsurge in interest.

At a glance it was near impossible to tell the cowpokes from the computer nerds who showed up Sunday for Santa Clarita’s Cowboy Poetry, Music and Film Festival.

Wanna-bes in denim, pointy boots and wide-brim hats filled the dirt streets of the Melody Ranch, a Western movie lot hired for the three-day festival that drew more than 3,000 visitors.

“Do you think anyplace in the Los Angeles area could be as perfect as this?” asked cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell to a sound studio filled with cheering fans.

The festival was moved to the set at the last minute, after the Northridge earthquake damaged a high school gym where it was to have been held. The city has applied for federal funds to pay for the estimated $13,000 in increased costs to rent the movie lot.

Out on Main Street, the saloon’s bartenders were pouring drinks, deputies on horseback were keeping an eye out, and Bub Warren was ready to fix you up with a new saddle. Even the tumbleweeds were tacked down in all the right places.

“I tell you what, cowboy stuff is hot,” said Warren, who brought his saddles to sell at the festival from Bend, Ore. They ranged in price from the standard $3,000 model to a leather, silver and gem-encrusted $50,000 beauty housed in a glass case.

After 25 years at his craft, Warren has noticed a sudden surge of popular interest in all things cowboy. Festival organizers agree, saying popularity has grown since a similar festival started in Elko, Nev., seven years ago. Even National Public Radio jumped on the bandwagon with its regular airing of cowboy poet Baxter Black.

Unlike, say, the work of Ezra Pound, part of the draw of cowboy poetry is its literalness. The verse tells stories about work and nature and courage, with melancholy or humor--and, like rap lyrics, it flaunts a slew of double negatives in iambic pentameter.

And the sold-out audience for Sunday’s 2 p.m. performance loved it.

Of course, you won’t find much cow dung on those $300 boots everyone seemed to be parading around the movie lot in. It seems that cowboys and urban hipsters have at least this in common: They are far outnumbered by their imitators.

Said leather craftsman Warren: “Seems I’m building more saddles for interior decorators than buckaroos.”

Heck, not that he minds. He just sold a $6,000 saddle to an orthodontist for his office. “The goal of many of us is to provide gear that is functional for working buckaroos,” said Vickie Mullen, who organized the festival’s 30 or so vendors and specializes in horsehair products such as rope and belts. “But I don’t mind if somebody puts it on their wall.”

One decorator item might be the $700 hitched rope she has on display. Like all of her products, and much of the cowboy Americana being sold these days, the horsehair comes from China.

Encino attorney Marshall Oldman says he loves this stuff. His hat says, “Cowboy lawyer,” the name of a group of about 150 California barristers who organize four to five horse rides a year.

“I’ve always had an interest in the Old West,” said the 42-year-old Agoura resident, who owns a ranch east of Bakersfield.

Cowboys--unlike other American laborers--have enjoyed a worldwide reputation for romantic adventures that were told first in early 20th-Century dime-store novels and then in movies. The recent rekindling of interest in this country is part of a cycle that cowboy singer Don Edwards has seen over the past 34 years.

Last time around, it was the film “Urban Cowboy” that was the spur. “Ugh, that was disco-country music,” said Edwards, a sweet-voiced balladeer.

He has recently teamed with poet Mitchell for shows, and the pair figure that they are on the road between 200 and 300 days a year.

“I just got back from Rome, Italy, where there were 3,000 people in the streets listening to cowboy music,” Edwards said.

They and other professionals say the growing interest in cowboy music and poetry--”This is not country-and-Western,” insists Edwards--comes from a generation of Americans who long for simpler times and traditional values.

“My husband is an engineer during the week and a cowboy on weekends,” said Priscilla Nielsen, a festival volunteer. “We and a lot of other people identify with the ideas that good is good and bad is bad. I think it is a sense of integrity that draws people to the cowboy movement.”

The performers, most of whom once worked as cowboys, say they don’t mind that fans at this and other festivals mostly just dress the part--many of them even are--whoa, pardner!--property owners.

But as any real cowboy will tell you, that automatically excludes you from their gang, even if you deal in cattle instead of computers.

“If they’re yours, then you’re a rancher, not a cowboy,” said cowboy poet and Hidden Valley resident Gary Roberts. “I still chase other people’s cows.”