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INTRODUCTION |
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We talk in the East of a public for poetry, and when we use this term we are usually thinking of the public that will, or will not, be prevailed upon to buy the books of poetry regularly issued by the standard Eastern publishers. But there is in this country a considerable public for poetry of which no account is taken in the yearly summaries of The Publishers' Weekly; that is, the public that enjoys and creates folk-poetry in the United States, a public much larger and more varied than we imagine. In this connection we have the story of a cowboy down on his luck who had a collection of cowboy songs printed (some of which he had written himself) and sold enough copies of the little volume to set himself up in business again. This does n't mean that he sold enough to buy a new outfit — "a forty-dollar saddle on a twenty-dollar horse " — and start punching cattle again. No; the sum made on the little paper-covered volume was very much more than that; it would have made any Eastern poet jealous. And the book was sold, not at news stands or book stores, but, like the old broad-sheet ballads, at cow-camps and round-ups and cattle-fairs.
The title of this little book was Songs of the Cow- ' boys, the collector, N. Howard Thorp, and the book was set up by an Estancia print-shop in 1908. Mr. Thorp himself was the author of five of the songs |
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