To some, cowboys and poetry may not coexist. However, the two have a history together. In Douglasville, the cultural arts council has held Georgia cowboy poetry gatherings for years. Aleck Ragsdale attended their 17th annual event this weekend.
There were about 100 people, mostly seniors, inside the Chapel Hill High School Theater. A chuck wagon and fake campfire decorated the stage as cowboy poets prepared to take microphone. As he stepped up Steve Porter’s cowboy hat shadowed his face from the stage lights.
Reciting poetry isn’t nearly as exciting as cowboy life is portrayed in movies, but Cowboy poet Tom Kerlin of Fayetteville says poetry helped cowboys fight the boredom of riding a horse all day long.
“Well, back in the old days before television and radio and all that stuff, the cowboys just had to entertain themselves and one of the things the would do was sit around and tell stories and reminisce. There was nothing to do at night. And some of the stories wound up being songs and some of them wound up being poems. And the poems were easy to remember because they rhymed.”
The poems from the past were more about a horse or a way of life than about longing for a lost love. That’s the kind of oral history fellow poet Frank Wood and others want to preserve.
“It just reminds me of a time that I’m afraid is gone, or is going. And every time I hear it I get very nostalgic. All of us say we were born a hundred years too late.”
While these cowboy gatherings are a much bigger deal out west, organizers of this event claim that Douglasville is actually the largest gathering of cowboy poets east of the Mississippi.
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