When Elko, Nevada began hosting the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering nearly 40 years ago, I was skeptical. I don't mind any group of people getting together to read their poetry, some of which were set to song. My problem with this was that they were putting it forward as an organic folk tradition. You've got to be kidding.

I was wrong. I was completely wrong. There is, in fact, an organic folk tradition of cowboy/buckaroo poetry composition and singing - on the range. It is part of occupational folklore dating back to well over a century, and the Gathering - and many similar "spin off" festivals - celebrate this. The Gathering and the festivals have also changed the tradition, as one might expect.

In addition, decades before the gathering there was a marketing campaign and commercial interests who exploited the existing folk tradition or wrote songs "in the tradition of," passing off their work as part of Western tradition. This is an understandable process, and we shouldn't be too hard on those who saw an obvious opportunity to exploit an existing market. America (and elsewhere) has always been fascinated by the Wild West and by cowboys, and selling songs is a time-honored tradition in itself.

The folklorists Foster and Tolbert have arrived at a term, The Folkloresque (with a 2016 volume of essays entitled just that), to describe elements of culture that are inspired by, fashioned to seem like, or otherwise draw from folklore without being "real." What we have with cowboy songs is some genuine tradition and some folkloresque, and the two become entwined. When people in the 1980s began to gather to celebrate this tradition, it attracted many "genuine faux cowboys" who participated. By the 1980s, identifying expressions of the tradition, untainted by singing cowboy movies and popular recordings, was impossible. Foster and Tolbert would also tell us that sorting it out is not as important as understanding what was a predictable interplay between tradition and commercial imitation.