Photos: The 19th annual St. Anthony Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held Friday and Saturday in St .Anthony, Idaho, featured readings, a cowboy variety show and trail songs.
Audiences had long been accustomed to western heroes who never were, having been sanitized by the trail songs of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and the righteous gunplay of the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy.
The cowboy classic El Paso, with its tale of a cowboy so in love with a Mexican girl that he shoots a man just for having a drink with her, featured on Robbins' 1959 album Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs.
Indeed, he trailed unreleased songs by naming them in interviews and sleeve notes for the published albums.
Two months ago, Billboard began incorporating YouTube views in the formula for computing its all-important Hot 100 singles chart, allowing viral-video smashes to reach No. 1 even if they trailed other songs in sales and airplay, two of the chart's other criteria.
He had already been on the radio at KFVD, in Los Angeles, where he began to make the transition from traditional country and folk music to more pointed political material, and the Library of Congress sessions reveal that he had a broadcaster's sense of how to lead into a song, or trail out of one.
At the reception, the bride rose to sing "Colorado Trail," a cowboy song, but not before telling the crowd, "I promised myself I wouldn't do this, unless I had too much to drink".
The couple planted stereo speakers along the trail, playing love songs.
Naively, I was unaware of the inevitable criticism that trails every charity song or celebrity driven charity venture.
However, as the song trails off, he raps about a kid "with a basketball and some Now and Laters to eat" — ostensibly Lamar himself, who may or may not have killed someone.
