Posts: 3

1. Old Time Movie Cowboys

   29.Apr.08, 20:21 EDT
   
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   You have to have a little age on you to remember some of the sure enough old time movie cowboys . . . but I've got enough years behind me now to remember them.  By the time I came along as a movie watcher in the late 1940s, some of those silver screen cowboys had been around for quite a while.  I grew up in a mill village community back in South Carolina, and all us kids played cowboys and Indians a lot.  Finding an Indian back then was hard, so we always made the smaller kids do that.  Sometimes we rotated assignments between being a guy in the white hat or the guy in the black hat. 
   
   My dad was from Oregon, and when I was about six years old we made a cross country trip by car from Duncan, South Carolina to Burns, Oregon.  That's where I met my uncle Dave for the first time, and he was a real cowboy.  And . . . he gave me my first authentic cowboy hat - no kiddie dime store hat, mind you . . . a real felt cowboy hat.  And it had a vest with it, and that made it extra cool for a six year old.  I have absolutely nothing from my childhood - no toys or anything like that.  But hanging on the walls of Campo Madrone are my son's cowboy stuff, things like chaps and two-gun holster outfits, and even a few of his old shirts.  Maybe it's not important to most folks, but having that stuff around is big with me.
   
   My favorite old time movie cowboy was Ken Maynard.  I liked 'em all, but I really liked Maynard.  Cowboy singer Don Edwards is a big enthusiast of old time cowboy movies.  I visited in his home a week ago, got a kick out of all his pictures . . . and wouldn't you know, he had a big picture of my favorite - Ken Maynard.  And we talked about that for a while, compared notes on who we liked the best. 
   
   Yeah, I know, movie cowboys weren't real cowboys, but they sure as helll were real movie cowboys.  Maybe we've lost something worth saving from that age, something important.  Are our modern movie hero types a good replacement for the Ken Maynard and Tom Mix hero characters of the past?  I don't think so.  The good guy always won back then, and bad guys were bad, if you get my drift.  White hats versus the black hats, good against evil . . . and the guy in the white hat was always equal to the task of whipping the bad guy.  And, they could get in a tough fist fight and never get that white hat knocked off.  They didn't bleed either.  Nah, these modern movie guys are weaklings compared to Ken Maynard.
   
   Sometimes I wonder, though, how Ken or Tom or Gene or Roy or Lash would've done against the predator.  I'm pretty sure, though, that Ken couldn've kicked Rocky's butt in a fist fight.  He might've had his hat knocked off, but I still think he could take him.
   
   Wanna Bet?
   
   PMC, 4/29/08

2. The Church on the Mesa

   25.Apr.08, 19:54 EDT
   
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   It's about eight in the evening at the old school auditorium in Nara Visa, New Mexico.  The place is packed, and it's hot and dusty.  The school has been shut down for some forty years, but the buildings and grounds have been preserved as a community center.  Nara Visa, a tiny town of less than 100 people, sits in the prairie just across the New Mexico line, about fifty miles west of Dalhart, Texas, maybe the same distance to Tucumcari, New Mexico.  Buck Ramsey and I chose this place to host our cowboy gathering because we loved the prairie there . . . grass as far as the eye can see.  This is cowboy country, pure and simple, the perfect place to do our show.
   
   This is our second Cowboy Chautauqua Company show.  The first one was a big hit, one that folks raved about, and now we're doing it at Nara Visa before the most pure dee cowboy crowd anyone could ever hope to assemble.  Three time the number of people in the small town have come.  This is the big test.  We want our show to be cowboy to the core, something real punchers could take heart in and be proud of.  I'm nervous as the show starts.
   
   And then there's the church on the mesa about a half mile away, sitting there with the sinking sun behind it.  Rays of sunlight are coming through the stained glass windows of that little Catholic Church, and it's an inspiring sight indeed.  I've got a stage full of cast members, all of them squinting against the dying sun . . . but still bright.  They're too mesmerized by the sight of the light through the windows, the grey form of the church against a pink horizon.  We're a quarter of the way through our show, and the audience is sitting in silence, staring at us like they're at high mass, not a cowboy show.  They look almost stunned, and I'm thinking that maybe we're laying a big egg.
   
   Then Rick Martinez and his band Everywhere West rise to play, and it's a beautiful old cowboy song they're singing.  Joe Stevenson plays the fiddle, they sing in perfect harmony, and I know for sure that we've caught a groove.  The show is going just the way I hoped it would.  When they finish, I see that Buck Ramsey has lowered his head, and I know he's fighting back tears.  He's moved, and so am I.  But we go on with the show as the sun fades away, leaving us in darkness.  The crowd still has not moved, has not shown me anything one way or another about how they are taking our performances.  And then it ends, and we all move forward to take our bows.  The place erupts in applause as people leap to their feet, and the standing ovation goes on for some time.  We did it.  We won them over.
   
   For the next five or six years, we won over audiences in a number of places.  All of our shows didn't go as well as that one.  I never again experienced anything like doing that show and watching that sunset, seeing that church on the mesa with it's glowing windows.  Maybe I never will again, but we did recapture some of the magic of that moment a few more times before we stopped doing shows several years later.  Some of the original members of the Cowboy Chautauqua Company are gone now. A few have died, some have retired from the business, which was the case with me.  I haven't been on stage in ten years.
   
   But lately . . . just in recent months, the glow of that sunset is in my head again.  I'm lonesome from old friends, old days . . . and old ways.  I make some calls, send out a few letters and emails, and the response is enthusiastic.  I ask, should we do it again?  Is there enough left in us to bring back the magic, do good shows?  Can we find some young guys to carry on where the old have faded away?  And the calls come back to me, and my guys are saying that maybe we should give in another go.  It was good back then, and there's still a few of us around who saw the sunset back years ago, the church with the rays of sun streaming through the windows.  We remember.  
   
   And sometime . . . remembering is enough to start again.
   
   PMC, 4/24/08

3. Cowboy To The Core . . . Good All The Way Through!

   22.Apr.08, 01:06 EDT
   
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   Chautauquas were a big part of the American entertainment scene during the last half of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries.  They died out mostly because of the the invention of motion pictures and radios . . . but they thrived for nearly half a century.  Describing what they did isn't easy because a wide disparity of styles and formats existed among them.  But a national circuit developed, one where traveling troupes of entertainers came through small towns across America on a regular basis.  These shows were in part educational, aimed at bringing the thriving culture of the cities to the rural parts of the country.
   
   The Cowboy Chautauqua Company was born in 1990 on Buck Ramsey's front porch in Amarillo, Texas.  I had stopped off for a visit, and we started talking about putting together a cowboy stage show.  Buck came up with the name chautauqua, but neither of us could spell it.  A trip to the public library took care of that and gave us the name for our new traveling road show. 
   
   We did shows over the next half dozen years, mostly on stages where we could do a one night program that carried audiences on a two hour journey through cowboy culture from the beginning to the present.  It featured performances of traditional and contemporary cowboy music, humor, poetry, storytelling by some of America's best known cowboy entertainers.  The show was well received, and people continued to talk about it after the company disbanded over ten years ago.  Buck Ramsey died about that time, and I simply allowed the company to fade away.
   
   But over the years I've received some encouragement to revise the company, resurrect it, and do more shows.  Buck is no longer with us, nor is J.B. Allen, a mainstay of the show during those formative years.  In recent weeks I've been in contact with a dozen performers, and all of them have agreed to work with us . . . if and when we start doing shows again.  The creation of this site on moli is a step toward doing just that.  It will take some time to get this site to where it should be, but a start has been made. 
   
   Our stage show goes in rounds of performances that are done according to a script, a narration of what we do and why we do it.  It moves quickly with some forty different individual performances packed into that two hour slot.  There's some humor, lots of nostalgia, great songs, engaging poems, and even some storytelling.  The audience is taken on a narrated trip through the culture of the American cowboy - his writings, his music, his art, and his contribution to American history.  If you don't know the world of cowboy entertainment, you may not know these names, but here is a list of those who'll be working with us from time to time. 
   
   Andy Wilkinson - writer, songwriter, singer from Lubbock,  Texas
   Phil Martin (me) - writer, poet, songwriter, narrator from Brady, Texas
   Dale Burson - instrumentalist (banjo, mando, guitar), and singer from Channing, Texas
   Michael Stevens - guitarist, singer/songwriter from Alpine, Texas
   Glenn Moreland - fiddle player, singer/songwriter, humorist from Ft. Davis, Texas
   Rod Taylor - singer/songwriter from Cimarron, N. Mex.
   Rick Brumley - singer from Sanford, Texas
   Darin Brookman - poet from Hollis, Oklahoma
   Guy Logsdon - folklorist, singer from Tulsa, Oklahoma
   Andy Hedges - singer/songwriter, reciter from Lubbock, Texas
   Chris Isaacs - poet, humorist from Eager, Arizona
   Stan Cobb - artist, poet, humorist from Dallas, Texas
   R.W. Hampton - singer/songwriter from Miami, N. Mexico
   Bill Larsen - poet from Casper, Wyoming
   
   We'll probably be adding more performers later on, but we're off to a good start.  This site will grow daily as I add more information about our performers, their works, and what can be expected of our company.  It's cowboy to the core . . . and it's good!  And it's nothing like you'd expect from a bunch of cowboy.
   
   PMC, 4/20/08