Black America Saddles Up to Own Its Cowboy Heritage
The Observer
Culture
African American artists are taking wild west style from the fringes to the cultural mainstream
Edward Helmore
Sat 21 Sep 2019 21.07 EDT
Guardian
America is never far from the frontier mentality and 2019 is proving no exception, with an African American cultural boom in all things cowboy, known colloquially as “the yee-haw agenda”.
Surprised? You should not be. African American cowboys have largely been erased from the record by Hollywood narratives starring John Wayne and Robert Redford, but were estimated to amount to one in four in the wild west. Now artists and musicians seem determined to put a stop to the exclusion with figures including Beyoncé, her sister Solange Knowles and Cardi B adopting western style.
One reason is the increased awareness of the part African Americans played on the western ranges at the end of slavery, when many former slaves headed to Texas looking for work.
That history is now proving as rich for black America as it had been for the film director John Ford – and the stories they tell are not very different. In 1907, the African American cowboy Nat Love wrote of his life in Dodge City, Kansas, as “a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else”. Love, who was born into slavery near Nashville, Tennessee, drank with Billy the Kid, participated in shootouts with Native Americans, rounded up cattle and amused himself with activities like “dare-devil riding, shooting, roping and such sports”.
However, life for freed slaves was hardly an idyll where racism and oppression had suddenly ceased to exist; the word “cowboy” itself, some say, had roots in a slur on these black labourers.
Along with the rise of racism and xenophobia in Donald Trump’s America, there has also been a reassertion of the role of African Americans in places that are not normally acknowledged.
The New York University photography professor Isolde Brielmaier says: “This is much less of a trend and much more about representation and visibility and addressing the erasure of that culture in the American imagination. We’re seeing a very strong move on the part of marginalised communities to say: ‘We were here and we exist.’”
From a cultural standpoint, it’s hard to find a rhythm and blues star who did not at some point don a cowboy hat. Ray Charles recorded country tracks throughout his career, putting out the great Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music album in 1962, and often said he was drawn to the stories in the songs from Nashville’s songwriters.
From Charlie Rich to Otis Redding – once filmed on his Big “O” ranch in denim overalls – to Curtis Mayfield and the Gap Band (who put out the single Burn Rubber on Me with a video of the trio in denim and cowboy hats), the western style has always been in the fringes, so to speak.
Lest any of this rich history go to waste, Idris Elba is to star in Concrete Cowboys, a film about Philadelphia’s black equestrian community, the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, which has provided safety and security for the neighbourhood for more than a century.
The film was inspired by Greg Neri’s 2011 novel Ghetto Cowboy about a 15-year-old boy from Detroit who is abandoned by his mother and sent to live in Philadelphia with the father he has never met, who is a black urban cowboy. In an interview last year, the director Ricky Staub said he was surprised to see a cowboy ride past his office. “What the heck is going on?” he wondered. “Why are you riding a horse in the hood?”
In the murder capital of Compton in Los Angeles, there is another effort to harness horses and the cowboy ethos as a counter to gangs and violence. The Compton Cowboy posse officially came together as a group in 2017, though the area of Richland Farms has been home to African American equestrians since the mid-20th century.
“They don’t pull us over or search us when we’re on the horses,” Compton Cowboy Anthony Harris, 30, told the New York Times last year. The horses, Harris explained, protected the 10 members of the posse from police harassment. “They would have thought we were gangbangers and had guns or dope on us if we weren’t riding, but these horses protect us from all of that.”
Elba and the Compton Cowboys, it turns out, will be in good company. Nashville’s ability to turn out crossover stars such as Kacey Musgraves has helped re-establish an upbeat version of country in the pop mainstream, but it is the black cowboy who has been turning up all over town, as witnessed by Texas pop-culture commentator Bri Malandro.
Malandro’s Instagram account @theyeehawagenda serves as a celebration of black cowboy aesthetics in popular culture. It’s a treasure trove where you’ll find anyone and everyone, old and new, offering a nod to the western style, from Beyoncé in her Destiny’s Child days wearing a cowboy hat to her more recent Daddy Lessons, and her sister Solange who put western visuals to her album When I get Home.
Meanwhile, the New York fashion label Telfar put the black cowboy aesthetic on the catwalk in its autumn/winter collection this year.
Vogue decided that Nas X’s look – from designer Christian Cowan – “may just be the most dazzling interpretation of the boundary-pushing” trend.
Now we know even the Lone Ranger is based on an African American cowboy, the black cowboy in pop culture, crossing and recrossing cultural lines, erasing them in the process, is in full swing.
To Brielmaier, the “yeehaw agenda” is about reasserting visibility.
“It’s very intentional on the part of Lil Nas X to place a black, gay cowboy in our visual purview. His playfulness is grounded in an important history that has gone underrepresented for a long time. I’m here. This is my space. What’s the big deal?”
Culture
African American artists are taking wild west style from the fringes to the cultural mainstream
Edward Helmore
Sat 21 Sep 2019 21.07 EDT
Guardian
America is never far from the frontier mentality and 2019 is proving no exception, with an African American cultural boom in all things cowboy, known colloquially as “the yee-haw agenda”.
Surprised? You should not be. African American cowboys have largely been erased from the record by Hollywood narratives starring John Wayne and Robert Redford, but were estimated to amount to one in four in the wild west. Now artists and musicians seem determined to put a stop to the exclusion with figures including Beyoncé, her sister Solange Knowles and Cardi B adopting western style.
One reason is the increased awareness of the part African Americans played on the western ranges at the end of slavery, when many former slaves headed to Texas looking for work.
That history is now proving as rich for black America as it had been for the film director John Ford – and the stories they tell are not very different. In 1907, the African American cowboy Nat Love wrote of his life in Dodge City, Kansas, as “a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else”. Love, who was born into slavery near Nashville, Tennessee, drank with Billy the Kid, participated in shootouts with Native Americans, rounded up cattle and amused himself with activities like “dare-devil riding, shooting, roping and such sports”.
However, life for freed slaves was hardly an idyll where racism and oppression had suddenly ceased to exist; the word “cowboy” itself, some say, had roots in a slur on these black labourers.
Along with the rise of racism and xenophobia in Donald Trump’s America, there has also been a reassertion of the role of African Americans in places that are not normally acknowledged.
The New York University photography professor Isolde Brielmaier says: “This is much less of a trend and much more about representation and visibility and addressing the erasure of that culture in the American imagination. We’re seeing a very strong move on the part of marginalised communities to say: ‘We were here and we exist.’”
From a cultural standpoint, it’s hard to find a rhythm and blues star who did not at some point don a cowboy hat. Ray Charles recorded country tracks throughout his career, putting out the great Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music album in 1962, and often said he was drawn to the stories in the songs from Nashville’s songwriters.
From Charlie Rich to Otis Redding – once filmed on his Big “O” ranch in denim overalls – to Curtis Mayfield and the Gap Band (who put out the single Burn Rubber on Me with a video of the trio in denim and cowboy hats), the western style has always been in the fringes, so to speak.
Lest any of this rich history go to waste, Idris Elba is to star in Concrete Cowboys, a film about Philadelphia’s black equestrian community, the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, which has provided safety and security for the neighbourhood for more than a century.
The film was inspired by Greg Neri’s 2011 novel Ghetto Cowboy about a 15-year-old boy from Detroit who is abandoned by his mother and sent to live in Philadelphia with the father he has never met, who is a black urban cowboy. In an interview last year, the director Ricky Staub said he was surprised to see a cowboy ride past his office. “What the heck is going on?” he wondered. “Why are you riding a horse in the hood?”
In the murder capital of Compton in Los Angeles, there is another effort to harness horses and the cowboy ethos as a counter to gangs and violence. The Compton Cowboy posse officially came together as a group in 2017, though the area of Richland Farms has been home to African American equestrians since the mid-20th century.
“They don’t pull us over or search us when we’re on the horses,” Compton Cowboy Anthony Harris, 30, told the New York Times last year. The horses, Harris explained, protected the 10 members of the posse from police harassment. “They would have thought we were gangbangers and had guns or dope on us if we weren’t riding, but these horses protect us from all of that.”
Elba and the Compton Cowboys, it turns out, will be in good company. Nashville’s ability to turn out crossover stars such as Kacey Musgraves has helped re-establish an upbeat version of country in the pop mainstream, but it is the black cowboy who has been turning up all over town, as witnessed by Texas pop-culture commentator Bri Malandro.
Malandro’s Instagram account @theyeehawagenda serves as a celebration of black cowboy aesthetics in popular culture. It’s a treasure trove where you’ll find anyone and everyone, old and new, offering a nod to the western style, from Beyoncé in her Destiny’s Child days wearing a cowboy hat to her more recent Daddy Lessons, and her sister Solange who put western visuals to her album When I get Home.
Meanwhile, the New York fashion label Telfar put the black cowboy aesthetic on the catwalk in its autumn/winter collection this year.
Vogue decided that Nas X’s look – from designer Christian Cowan – “may just be the most dazzling interpretation of the boundary-pushing” trend.
Now we know even the Lone Ranger is based on an African American cowboy, the black cowboy in pop culture, crossing and recrossing cultural lines, erasing them in the process, is in full swing.
To Brielmaier, the “yeehaw agenda” is about reasserting visibility.
“It’s very intentional on the part of Lil Nas X to place a black, gay cowboy in our visual purview. His playfulness is grounded in an important history that has gone underrepresented for a long time. I’m here. This is my space. What’s the big deal?”
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