John Lomax was born just after the American Civil War and he managed to meet the cowboys from the age of Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid and so forth.
He collected their home made songs and what I suppose you might call bush poetry.
A lot of lonely cowboys yippy yi yowin on lonesome prairies with their dogies.
The most interesting items in the program were recordings made by Lomax in the early part of the 20th century, in situ, so to speak. To cowboy meeting places he took an early Edison wax cylinder gizmo and persuaded the cowboys to sort of shout down a tin cyclinder to record their songs. So to-day we can hear the authentic voices of early American " bush poets " with their original performances.
These things have been carefully preserved by the American Government as their cultural heritage.
We don't seem to have the same thing in Australia, unfortunately. Careful recording of old originals that is.
There's a couple of recordings of Banjo Paterson maybe and one of Dorothea Mckellar
How interesting it would be to hear Henry Lawson reciting The Men we might have Been.
or Adam Lindsay Gordon doing The Sick Stockrider, C.J.Dennis doing The Play.( I don't know if he was ever recorded ) or Patrick Hartigan reading Said Hanrahan. Even recordings of some of the old country people who recited these things way back in those days would be something to treasure.
I wonder what efforts our Government would be interested in to preserve as our cultural poetic or song heritage. Probably none.
Another thought that I had about the program was how similar in some ways the cowboy song tradition was to the Australian bush poetry, yet how different. Similar experiences of wide outdoors, hard life with stock and pioneering spirit, but very different modes of expression used. I don't think that the two could live side by side that well.
