By Gail Steiger
I grew up in the 60s listening to my grandfather, Gail Gardner, sing songs and recite poems he’d written about his favorite parts of life, most of which involved cowboying around Skull Valley in the 20s and 30s. “The Sierry Pete’s” or “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail” was his big hit. 
In the early 80s, I stopped by my grandparents’ house on Mount Vernon. 

“Hey Granny, where’s Papa?” “Oh, Big Jim Griffiths from the U of A and that nice young Warren Miller from Sharlot Hall hauled him down to the museum to sing some songs and tell stories to some school kids. He was giggling like a teenager when they wheeled him out to their van.”

Jim Griffiths, Warren Miller, Hal Cannon and other western folklorists were finding, interviewing and recording practitioners of what they feared might be a dying art, and one certainly unique to the west. They called it Cowboy Poetry. During the course of their research, they would meet at folklore conferences and discuss some of the colorful characters they’d encountered and some of the great poetry they’d discovered.