Speakers Bureau Speaker
Greg Scott, Nogales
Greg Scott is an educator, historian, and musician. His lifelong interest in Arizona cowboy folk music has taken him throughout the state and the West, researching the songs and the people who sang them. Scott has been a Traditional Music Roster Artist for the Arizona Commission on the Arts and regularly performs at schools, libraries, museums, and festivals.
Presentations may be made in Spanish, and are suitable for high school as well as adult audiences.
Badger Clark, Cowboy Poet
Badger Clark was probably the first poet to make his living writing and reciting cowboy verse. It was in the Arizona Territory in 1906 that Clark discovered his muse. The young TB patient found cowboy work in Cochise County, and thrilled with his new lifestyle, companions, and environment, Clark turned to verse to express his delight and renewed health. His poems, published in western literary magazines, quickly brought him national acclaim. Badger returned to his native South Dakota and published his collected Arizona verse in 1915. For the next four decades he relived his cowboy life in stories and verse throughout the country to audiences large and small. Clark’s poetry is still in print, and he is perhaps as popular today as he was fifty years ago. Cowboy poets still recite and sing his famous poems like "A Cowboy's Prayer" and "A Border Affair." This presentation examines several of Badger’s best-known poems and songs, and explores his life in Arizona and as South Dakota’s "poet lariat." Additionally, some of his unpublished and out-of-print verse is used, including Badger’s humorous take on Arizona’s attempts to gain statehood.
The Crooked Trail to Holbrook
"The Crooked Trail to Holbrook" is an authentic cowboy song known throughout the West that celebrates a cattle drive from the Mescal Mountains all the way to Holbrook. For decades, the circuitous trail was used to drive tens of thousands of cattle and horses to the railhead on the Little Colorado. It also witnessed the Pleasant Valley War, Apache raids, and peaceful ranching and farming. Some of Arizona’s most famous, and infamous, citizens rode the trail. In this presentation, Scott discusses both the song and the history of this region and trail. Included are other classic cowboy songs from the area and the stories of the more noteworthy people and events along the Crooked Trail.
