Many stereotypes of the American cowboy are more firmly rooted in Hollywood than in reality.
We’ve talked before about Black cowboys and the Black rodeo circuit, but a new book, “The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America,” is among the first to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America.
Ron Tarver, the author and photographer behind the book, joined the Texas Standard to talk about his work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity:
Texas Standard: I understand you grew up just across the Texas border in Oklahoma but spent a long time at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Not exactly the first place that comes to mind when you think of cowboys, but one of the reasons we have this book today is because of an experience you had a couple of decades back, seeing Black cowboys in Philly.
Ron Tarver: Oh, yeah. I was working on a story for the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine, on drugs and the heroin epidemic, actually. And I’d been working on that for about a year and a half, and I was just so burnt out after that story that I wanted to find a story that was, first of all, in color — and that had a little bit of joy to it. I thought it would be a light story for the magazine.
And so I pitched to my editors about these Black cowboys. It’s sort of a scene in Philadelphia, seeing these guys sort of riding up and down the roads and in the parks and places. So I thought, well, I’d just like to check that out and see what’s going on. And so that’s where the whole story got started.
But then you started to get an avalanche of mail — a lot of this is pre-email, I’m guessing — from readers who were just blown away by these images that you captured.
Yeah. I mean, I grew up in Oklahoma. My relatives had ranches and farms and things, and there was a rodeo right up the street from me. We would spend our Saturdays going to the barn and whatnot. I thought it’d be a nice story, but I didn’t anticipate the amount of surprise from our readers.
I mean, people were saying, “is this a real thing? I can’t believe it. These pictures are so nice, where did you shoot them?”
And, after that, I told my editors, why don’t we go out and continue this story for Black History Month? And they let me do that, and National Geographic picked up and it just carried on from there. And it’s been a 30 year trip.
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You gathered something north of 15,000 images? How did you winnow it down from that?
There were around 15,000 slides. These are all transparencies, so this is way before the digital era. And during COVID, I went through them and I contacted a friend of mine who was a former editor at Geographic, who was just an amazing editor.
And she sat down with me and we just whittled through them and just got it down to I think around 5,000, and from there 2,000 to 1,000 to get it down to a manageable size of I think 500. And then we settled on 120 or 150 for the book.
I suppose I still need to ask you if you could give us your thoughts on what it means for cowboys to exist in contemporary society, and in particular the Black cowboy experience.
But I have to note up front that it’s interesting that with these images, the way that they’re structured, there’s not a feeling that there’s a narrative here. I’m thinking that was intentional.
For sure. One of my favorite books of all time was by a photographer, William Allard – he did a book years ago called “Vanishing Breed.” And it was just one of the most simple, beautiful books of cowboy life.
And it wasn’t structured in any sort of narrative. It was just these really beautiful images that sort of highlighted the romance of that lifestyle. And that’s what I modeled the book after. I didn’t want it to be in any sort of narrative structure.
There’s something emotional going on here. I mean, there’s several images that I just can’t shake. One of them is, I think it must have been behind the scenes at a rodeo. And I believe it’s sort of the shadow outline of a cowboy. And in the back you see that brightness from the area where the action goes on. I believe you call it a concrete canyon.
Yeah, actually, that was a parade. When I was done with the story of the cowboys in Philly, they went to a parade. They met some of the Black cowboys in Harlem and went down Fifth Street in Harlem.
And I was on a horse behind him, and I shot this guy, and it just reminded me instead of the big canyons out west, these guys are sort of riding along these concrete canyons. So, again, it’s more sort of poetic and metaphorical of their experience being urban cowboys.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that this book is coming out at a time when we’re seeing Black cowboy culture reach a new place in pop culture. You think of “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé’s recent album, and especially seeing a lot of this in music. What do you think’s going on?
It’s so funny. I mean, I tried to get this book published years ago. I had done a book before on Black veterans that was successful. And I took these images back to the editors — this is 20 years ago — and said, hey, how about we do a book on this?
And my editors said, oh, there’s no such thing as Black cowboys. It was just really disheartening because I just got such negative feedback from it.
I don’t know if it’s just the stars all aligned or what, but this book couldn’t have come out at a more perfect time. Because the whole idea of Black cowboys with Lil Nas X’s song coming out and “Concrete Cowboy,” the Idris Elba movie, and the Bass Reeves show and of course, Beyoncé. It couldn’t have come out in a more perfect time.
» MORE: With ‘Cowboy Carter,’ Beyoncé reminds us that she ‘has always been country’
When you talk about encountering that resistance earlier on, when you were trying to get this book published, I think a lot of people just are unfamiliar with the story of Black cowboys. When you talk with people about these images, and about the Black cowboy experience, how do you communicate that?
The book, like I said, celebrates this Western heritage that African Americans have. And it’s not anything new; we have always had a Western heritage.
If you look at where a lot of folks came up during the Great Migration from the south up to the north, they brought all those traditions with them, and they established stables and things like that in big cities. That heritage has always been here. It’s just been invisible, as a lot of Black culture has been invisible for so many years.
So I think it’s a matter of just opening the box and looking inside and saying, look, this has always existed. Black people have always had a Western experience. It’s not a fad. It’s nothing that just sort of sprang up out of nowhere. It’s always been.
What do you hope people get out of the book?
I just hope people enjoy looking at the photos. I hope people look at it and just let it soak in, because it’s not trying to do anything but say look at this lifestyle and look at these folks and look at where these people are.
They’re in the cities, they’re in the suburbs, they’re in the ranches. It’s everywhere. There’s kids, there’s older people. It’s not trying to be anything outside of what it is. They’re just supposed to be images to enjoy.
