There’s a certain level of coolness associated with the cowboy. The Wild West—complete with its black and white hats, dramatic standoffs, rebellious lone rangers, and absolutely ginormous belt buckles—is undeniably cool too. But sometimes cowboys are simplified into something that’s just cool. Something that exists only to serve an aesthetic purpose. That’s ignoring something really big: The Old West is instrumental in the building of an American culture.
The cowboy is American pop culture’s most important figure. It arose as Americans found a distinct identity in the values of the frontier. It’s a representation of the way the US wanted to present itself. Because of this, the archetype holds a lot of power. Over the last four decades, it has been harnessed by Conservatives, through media like country music, to project—at times exclusive—ideals about an individualist America.
The cowboy is America distilled into an image. It’s representative of lots of what we aspire to be: rugged and individualistic, self-reliant and strong, humble, free, gracious, and respectful. In fact, we’ve created this image—and projected it onto a once-real historical figure—as a sort of PR stunt.
In his 1893 paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner spoke about the role the American West has on the country’s development. “To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics,” he said, before describing a laundry list of traits, like coarseness, strength, materialism, individualism, power, restlessness, and freedom, “[which] are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.”
In short, the ideals of America were created in the Old West. And they were forged by cowboys. Unlike the East Coast, which was layered with European traditions and institutions, the West—to the frontier colonists’ point of view—was a blank slate. The ideas that rose out of the scrub brush weren’t inherited—they were invented. They were uniquely American.
But it’s almost impossible to aspire to be an idea. And so, these frontier ideas needed a figurehead. They needed something visually distinct, something recognizable, something that could summarize these thousand-or-so complex American characteristics into one instantly recognizable image. I figure I don’t have to tell you what they picked. Woody from Toy Story wasn’t a fur trader. America’s team isn’t named after railroad builders.
Cowboys were an easy choice to represent American values because, above all else, they’re relatable and humble. “It’s about being an ordinary guy, drinking an ordinary beer, none of your craft microbrews, thank you very much, and trying to make an honest living. That humbleness and unpretentiousness are really important,” Stanford film and media studies professor Scott Bukatman said. There is no prestige, no elitism, associated with the cowboy. It’s accessible to the average American.
To portray yourself as a cowboy is to inherit those attributes: humility, independence, and honor. And maybe, just maybe, to portray yourself as a cowboy is to portray yourself as a real American.
This universal appeal and cultural advantage made the cowboy image extremely sought after in pop culture. It seeped into everything from 1800s pulp magazines to “sweethearts” on the sidelines in Dallas to Pharrell Williams’ Louis Vuitton collections to yes, country music.
“I feel like people definitely compare country stars to cowboys. It might be a stereotype, but I would definitely think of cowboys and country as kinda the same thing,” senior Evie Filipek, a country fan, said.
And she’s right. Country music has adopted the aesthetic of cowboy culture for its own benefit. It’s hard to find a picture of Garth Brooks without a cowboy hat and a belt buckle. It’s hard to imagine Morgan Wallen as anything other than a rugged individualist.
It’s in the music too. When Beyoncé decided to do a country album, she named it Cowboy Carter. A jaunt through Spotify’s Country’s Greatest Hits playlist includes The Chicks’ “Cowboy Take Me Away,” Toby Keith’s “Should’ve Been A Cowboy,” Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys,” and Carrie Underwood’s “Cowboy Casanova.”
Current country superstars Zach Bryan, Jon Pardi, and Morgan Wallen each have album cuts likening themselves to cowboys (“If She Wants a Cowboy,” “Ain’t Always The Cowboy,” and “Cowgirls,” respectively). Luke Combs’ newest single, “Back in the Saddle,” is filled with cowboy imagery.
It’s easy to understand why country music would use this image. It allows them to project themselves as relatable, humble, honorable, and above all else, American. This serves as an important pull to the genre. Country music feels patriotic, and people (more or less) want to feel connected to their country.
“I mean, you’re not going to listen to Drake on the Fourth of July,” Filipek said. “You gotta be listening to Kenny Chesney.”
“I think a lot of country music was based on this American dream or so-called American feeling, which makes people more able to connect with it,” junior Lily Anderson, another country fan, said. It’s clear that country music connects to a deeper sense of American nationalism.
But why is that? There’s a case to be made that country music’s adoption of the cowboy image, an archetype deeply ingrained in American culture, is what makes it feel so close to the values of our nation.
So why should we even care?
Well, we all really love country music. It’s more popular right now than it has been in at least 20 years. Wallen’s I’m The Problem just broke the record for most weeks spent atop the Billboard 200 chart. That popularity has been driven by the youth.
Students cite different reasons for why they love the genre. Its relatively happy vibe and refrain from commenting on major social issues make it an easy escape. Its religious themes create personal connections with Christian listeners.
These are true and valid pulls to the genre. But I’m most fascinated by the idea that country music could be attractive to students because it feels stable and comfortable.
Other popular genres shift their sounds, aesthetics, and identity multiple times a decade. Country music doesn’t.
“Country music…always has this tension between navigating change…and then also holding onto things that seem sturdy,” Senior Music Editor for Nashville Public Radio Jewly Hight said. “Even though it’s a constantly evolving pop form it also kind of holds its sense of identity.”
Blogger, podcaster, and cowboy expert Chip Schweiger says the same is true about the cowboy image. “As a nation, we’ve been through some pretty complicated political battles, we’ve been through some pretty complicated social things…things have been, for all of us, a little bit in upheaval, and I think what the cowboy as an iconic figure brings is a sense of stability,” he said.
So won’t we be more likely to turn to something sound in times of turmoil? Won’t we be more likely to trust the values it tries to push? Isn’t something stable something more trustworthy?
I think now’s as good a time as any to address the elephant in the room. No popular culture ever exists in a vacuum, and, in the case of country music, once you recognize that, you’re dealing with a much bigger political issue. Mainstream country music is very Conservative.
“Like the Trumpian brand of politics, country music’s cultural politics are decidedly white and decidedly masculine,” opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom said in the New York Times essay “Country Music is Entirely at War With Itself”.
Now, I would like to clarify a couple of things. Liking country music and having Conservative viewpoints are not necessarily connected. Listening to Ye’s “All of the Lights” does not make one automatically anti-Semitic. People can, and probably should, consume media from all across the political spectrum.
But it’s important to recognize when a political bias overwhelms a cultural medium. Seeing the way the Nashville elites and Republican politicians control a cultural center can tell us a lot about the things they value.
Through country music, we can see Conservatives value selective exclusion. They failed to embrace Beyonce at the 2016 CMA’s, they’ve refused to acknowledge rising star Shaboozey, but Australian-born Keith Urban, and Post Malone (of “White Iverson” fame) are ay-okay.
But the adoption of the country cowboy is part of a much older Conservative trend. One which Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson likes to call the right’s use of “cowboy individualism.”
Dating back to the 60s, the values associated with the cowboy—namely, traditional family, distrust in “coastal elites,” disdain for big government, and individualism—struck a chord with rural Americans navigating through an increasingly globalized world. It influenced their votes, too.
Former film Western actor Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. He ran on little government, trickle-down economics, and an embrace of traditional family values. He championed “cowboy individualism.” He used it to bring historically libertarian ideas into the Republican mainstream. “Free thinkers” distrustful of Washington politicians are more likely to feel represented by a cowboy, an outlaw, a free thinker himself.
Since then, Republicans have made one of their main goals to present themselves as the individualists, the cowboys. They need their politics to control the cowboy image. So they went and found a cultural institution to do the work for them. They went and found Nashville.
“The music is a cover,” McMillan Cottom says about Republican control over country music, “The real goal is to have a home for political pop culture…They want Nashville for the same reason they want universities and the Kennedy Center. Their ideas have followers but few cultural institutions.”
Country music is an important cultural institution. It currently has a monopoly over the cowboy image. And because it has merged this image with its own, because right-wing culture warriors and “libertarian free thinkers” have convinced us that the cowboy is country, they can change what we think of as American values.
If the cowboy is the archetype of the American hero—and I believe it is—being able to attach that image to your own political beliefs becomes a powerful tool. It allows you to redefine what characteristics and values are seen as truly American. In short, if you can convince people you’re a cowboy, you can convince them that your values are America’s values.
So it would make sense why the right has put such an emphasis on controlling the cowboy. The cowboy is America. And through country music, the right has found a palatable and popular way to take control of it.
Except there’s one thing. We’ve talked about history, politics, fashion, music, and almost everything else there’s to talk about when thinking about pop culture. But, have you ever heard of a movie?
This is the first half of a two part article. The second part, titled “Opinion: How The Left Can Control the Cowboy” will be out on Wednesday, October 8th.
