Unearthing the Songs of Black Cowboys

The cowboy is usually imagined as white, but that story erases a much deeper history. Through the songs of Black cowboys, Karina Vernon uncovers a hidden archive that stretches from the Canadian prairies to Texas cattle drives and back to West Africa. Her work brings forward voices that reframe belonging, survival, and identity on the North American frontier.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
(western music)
- [Melissa Gismondi] What comesto mind when I say cowboy?
You might picture John Wayne.
- Go ahead and pull thatrifle if you want to,
but you better speak toyour boss before you use it
'cause he'll be deadbefore I hit the ground.
- [Melissa Gismondi] Or Clint Eastwood.

(00:21):
- You see, in this world
there's two kinds of people, my friend,
those with loaded guns and those who dig.
You dig.
- [Melissa Gismondi]Maybe even Kevin Costner.
- We don't kill sheep, we kill wolves.
- [Melissa Gismondi]The cowboy is a symbol

(00:42):
of the North American west,
often depicted in popular culture
as a glamorous or heroic figure.
He's almost always depicted as white.
But my guest today, Karina Vernon,
is one of several researchersdigging into myths
of the old West and findingthat the cowboys roots

(01:04):
just might take us allthe way to Western Africa.
(western music)
I am Melissa Gismondi,welcome to another episode
of Humanities at Large from theJackman Humanities Institute
at the University of Toronto.

(01:26):
Karina Vernon is an AssociateProfessor of English
at the University of Toronto,
but she grew up in ruralAlberta in a small town
about 90 kilometres north of Calgary,
a place where cowboy culture is strong.
So if I went back in time

(01:47):
and asked young Karina todraw me a picture of a cowboy,
what would that picture look like?
- [Karina Vernon] Oh,what a great question.
It would've been a youngable-bodied White man,
and there would've been no question.
There's no question that itwouldn't have been a woman.
There's no question that the cowboy

(02:09):
wouldn't have been Black.
That would not have beenthinkable to me at the time.
- [Melissa Gismondi] So as akid, as you were growing up,
you once said that you sort of grew up
feeling like an anomaly.
Why is that?
Tell me about that.
- [Karina Vernon] Yeah, so I was born
in Central America in Honduras,
and my family moved to the Prairies

(02:30):
when I was about nine years old.
We first landed in Calgary
and then we moved tothe small town of Olds.
And I just didn't seeany signs of blackness
in my environment.
There was no material sign or no,
no even cultural representation

(02:50):
of the region's Black history.
And so I felt like my sister and I,
were the first Black people.
I honestly thought this.
I thought my sister and Iwere the first Black people
to set foot on prairie soil,
and there's a way in whichI thought of us as pioneers.
It's a feeling that reallycan misshape your identity

(03:13):
if you don't think about yourself
as belonging to a history.
And so I've spent my researchcareer kind of assembling
that history and puttingtogether that genealogy
that actually I was a part ofeven then without knowing it.
- [Melissa Gismondi] Do you remember
the moment when you learnedthat there were Black cowboys,

(03:35):
not only in the U.S. but also in Canada?
Was there a particular story
or maybe a cowboy that you came across?
- [Karina Vernon] It musthave been through the work
of a wonderful Calgary writer
and historian named Cheryl Foggo.
She wrote a wonderful coming of age novel
called "Pourin' DownRain," about growing up

(03:57):
in the suburbs of Calgary in the 1960s.
And what jumped out about the book for me
is that Foggo herselfwrites about finding out
that there were Black cowboys.
And so there was this echo, you know,
she has written about
and has made a documentary

(04:19):
about going to theGlenbow museum in Calgary,
Glenbow Museum and archives
and finding out from adisplay in the atrium there
that there had been a Blackcowboy named John Ware.
And she ran home and told her brother
there was a Black cowboy named John Ware.
And he was like, "No, what?This changes everything."

(04:42):
And so I had the sameexperience, you know,
30 years after she did.
And it's an experiencethat keeps sort of echoing
down the chain.
This fact that there were Black cowboys
still occupies the status of a surprise
despite the work that has beendone to document the history.

(05:04):
I think the whitewashingof the cowboy story,
the whitewashing of theWest, is so powerful
that the fact of Black cowboys still,
still sounds mythical orstill sounds like sci-fi
or an alternate history of the West.
But it's in fact, you know,the idea that the cowboy

(05:25):
was always White, that is a myth
and that is an alternatehistory of the West.
- [Melissa Gismondi] Soyou mentioned John Ware,
this kind of famous Blackcowboy here in Canada.
Tell me a little bit about him.
- [Karina Vernon] Yeah,John Ware was born in Texas,
I believe he was born into slavery
and then saw the emancipation.

(05:47):
And after the Civil War, you know,
most jobs were closed to Black men.
So becoming a cowboywas one of the few ways
Black men could make a living.
So he joined the cattledrives up from Texas.
And after 1880,

(06:09):
when the Canadian governmentstarted lending land
to American British families,
and they started ranchesin the Canadian West,
what is currentlyAlberta and Saskatchewan.
So after the 1880s,
big ranching operations opened in Canada.
And so people like John Warestarted driving cattle up,
you know, past Wyoming, past Montana,

(06:31):
and over the 49th parallel to Canada.
And he stayed, instead ofreturning back to Texas,
he stayed, continued working as a cowboy,
eventually established his ownranch, married, had children,
and made himself extremelyfamous in his own time
for his skill with cattle.

(06:52):
He's credited with so-calledinventing the sport
of steer wrestling, whichis celebrated every year
at the Stampede, the Calgary Stampede.
You know, for a Black man in his time,
so he arrived on the Canadianside of the border in 1880,
and he became so wellknown that his funeral
was one of the biggestever attended in Calgary.

(07:16):
His wedding announcementran in the Calgary Herald,
and his wife is aninteresting person as well.
Mildred Ware came froma middle class family
in the suburbs of Toronto.
She's got her own interesting story.
She didn't like horses, she was not suited
to the cowboy life, but fell in love

(07:37):
with apparently an extremelycharming John Ware.
And his story is interesting because
although he's very well known
and there are high schoolsnamed for him in Calgary,
in a way his fame coversover the existence
of the other Black cowboys.

(07:57):
He's celebrated as kind ofa singular man, you know,
like he was the one and only Black cowboy,
but in fact he was partof a community, right?
He was part of a wholegeneration of Black men
who were cowboying anddriving cattle up north
and who were in and aroundsouthern Alberta at the time.

(08:19):
So yeah, his story is kind of... reveals
and conceals somethingabout the cowboy story.
- [Melissa Gismondi] Sothis broader community
of Black cowboys that he was a part of,
like how many, exactlyhow many are we talking,
and what do we knowabout their other lives?
Like we know about John Ware,
how would their lives compare to his?

(08:39):
- [Karina Vernon] Well,we know that in Texas
when the state of Texasjoined the Confederate states,
30% of the population was enslaved.
And so after emancipation one in four,
according to some historians,one in four cowboys was Black.
So that's a significantpopulation of Black cowboys.

(09:01):
How many of those arrived
on the Canadian side ofthat colonial border?
I still don't know.
We don't know the names ofall of those Black folks.
And as far as their lives,
that's the interesting part to me,
that their lives left few textual records.

(09:24):
So do we have letters fromthem written back home
to their sweethearts?
Not really as far as I know.
Since many were born into slavery,
I think few, like JohnWare was not literate.
So I've seen his signatureon legal documents

(09:44):
and it's a sort of quite a shaky hand.
So they didn't leave alot of textual records
and archivists and historians,
well, we love texts, you know,
that's the material thatwe usually work with.
What I'm looking at rightnow is the other materials
that they left, so-calledmaterials, a lot more ephemeral.
They left songs, you know, sothey sang about their lives,

(10:08):
they composed songs on horseback,
they sang about theconditions of their work.
They sang about theirrelationships with their bosses,
being swindled out ofmoney by their bosses.
They sang about loved ones,romantic relationships.
They wrote about being tired.

(10:31):
They wrote about theirrelationships with animals.
You know, I think that wecan hear in their songs
that they sang with their horses
and to the environment, you know,
they were singing aboutand to those western lands,
those Indigenous lands on Turtle Island,

(10:53):
they sang about colonialism,Indigenous people.
They sang about anti-Black racism.
And they thought aboutthose two things together.
♪ Oh, bull driving, riding. ♪
- [Karina Vernon] So Ithink about those songs
as a kind of Black autobiography
about life in thepost-emancipation period.

(11:16):
♪ I was riding there daily ♪
♪ And I know I'm a poor cowboy. ♪
♪ And I know I've done wrong. ♪
♪ Go bring me my pony,lemme ride up down in. ♪
♪ Then at my doorbell. ♪

(11:38):
♪ You got to be still. ♪
♪ Well, I made high time driving. ♪
♪ Will be up your quarter. ♪
♪ Way out in the westTexas up on some hill. ♪
- [Melissa Gismondi]The song you're hearing

(11:58):
is called "St. James Hospital"
performed by Moses "Clear Rock" Platt.
It was recorded by the musicologists John
and Alan Lomax in a Texas prison in 1933.
It's part of the Alan Lomax Collection
at the Library of Congress.
You'll hear more recordingsfrom their collections

(12:19):
throughout the episode.
The Lomax's preservation ofAfrican-American folk music
offers an important window
into the lives of Black cowboys.
But as Karina explains,it's also complicated.
- [Karina Vernon] Alan andJohn Lomax recorded this
in a penitentiary, right?

(12:41):
They figured, so they weremaking these recordings
in the 1930s and the cattledrives had largely ended
by the 1880s in the U.S.
And so they thought to themselves,
where can we get reallyauthentic cowboy songs?
If we go and record men whohave spent the last 40 years

(13:03):
in a penitentiary segregatedfrom the rest of society,
that's where we're goingto get the authentic songs.
So that's what they did.
And "Clear Rock" - Moses Platthimself had never been a cowboy,
but you can hear in thesong that he had heard,
definitely he had heard cowboy songs.
At the end there, you canhear the cattle calls,

(13:25):
the whoop whooping soundthat cowboys would use
to kind of giddy up thecattle that they were driving.
So he was part of the culture
and he was certainly oldenough to remember them.
He was 70 years old whenthat recording was taken.
But what I think that youcan hear in that recording

(13:46):
is a hybrid cowboy song slash prison song.
When I first heard it, Iwas struck by a line in it.
I'm a poor cowboy, I think he says,
and I know I'd done wrong.
And I was like, wait a second.
I don't, I haven't heardcowboy songs that have that,

(14:09):
that kind of humble sort ofrepentant type of lyric in it.
So I think that what we're hearing,
and I have to do more research on this,
but I think what we're hearing there
is "Clear Rock", Platt, hybridising,a traditional cowboy song
with something of his ownexperience in that Texas prison.

(14:34):
- [Melissa Gismondi] It's I guess kind of
how culture works, right?
You soak it up, you in digest it,
and then you kind ofoften put your own twist.
You put your, you see it through your,
the lens of your own experience.
- [Karina Vernon] Absolutely,the Lomax's as musicologists
wanted to record songs out of time, right?

(14:55):
They thought by going to prison,
they would find a populationthat was out of time,
outside of the culture.
And yeah, you're right,that's not how music works.
Music doesn't stand still.
And I think Moses Platt
was an incredible artist and he in a way,

(15:16):
smuggled something of hisown experience into the song.
- [Melissa Gismondi]So you were mentioning,
you know, this, that often quoteunquote literature scholars
or historians are obsessed with, you know,
we're obsessed with text.
Like what has been writtendown, what has been,
but that shifting tosomething, you know, like songs

(15:38):
or other kinds of form ofculture, you've talked about
how this is sort of leaving thesurface world of the archive
and moving into this undergroundrealm of oral tradition.
Talk a bit more about sort of
what possibilities this new method
has sort of opened up for you.
- [Karina Vernon] The archive

(15:59):
is a tricky space for historiansof Black people's lives.
On the one hand, thereare records that exist
that we can piece together totell the story of Black folks
dispersed onto Turtle Island.
But when the archiveis the only institution

(16:19):
to tell the story,
Black lives are kind ofoverdetermined as a story of lack.
You know, like the lack of documents
or the fragility of the history
is also then becomes part of the story.
So there's something exhilarating
about moving away from the archive,

(16:40):
exhilarating in both sense of the word.
Like it's a bit scary,you know, for someone
trained to read literature, to read texts
and to make meaning out of text.
But the history is so much bigger
than the archive can contain.
Something else is possiblewhen we think about the ways
that history has beenmattered on the Prairies

(17:02):
in other ways, like in songs,even in things like seeds
and fleshy bodies like horses and cattle.
So in what other ways on this continent
can we read and piece togetherthe history of Black folks?
And then we can write itin more positive terms.

(17:22):
We can think about it inmore positive terms, yeah.
- [Melissa Gismondi]And is songs the thing
that connects the dots?
Because you were saying earlier,
cowboys sang to their horses
and in relation to their environment.
So is that the thread that connects us
to also the plants around them,
the ecology that they're seeing,

(17:42):
the animals they're engaging with?
Is that sort of the through line?
- [Karina Vernon] That's the through line
that I'm following.
As a scholar trained inCanadian literature studies,
at first I began looking for Black cowboys
of the Canadian prairies
and thinking about their oral cultures.

(18:03):
But right away, like Imentioned with John Ware,
John Ware is connected with Texas.
So I had to leave, I hadto leave the Canadian space
and follow him to Texas.
And then there's a richcowboy song culture
in and around Texas and a song culture
that follows the cattle trail,

(18:25):
the Chisholm Trail northfrom Texas to Oklahoma,
Kansas, and then over the Canadian border.
And then that song culture,
I believe takes us tothe story of the arrival
of Black folks on thecontinent in the first place.
So I'm discovering that

(18:48):
cattle aren't Indigenous in the Americas
in reading agrarian science
and connecting with scientiststhat are doing research
on ancient DNA of cattle,
I'm discovering that thecattle species in the Americas
is connected to cattle species

(19:10):
on the west coast of Africa in Senegambia.
And that takes me in tugging this rope
all the way back toSenegambia in the 16th century
when people and cattle startedcoming across the Atlantic
as part of the transatlantic slave trade
in the 16th century.

(19:31):
- [Melissa Gismondi] I feellike that must have been,
I mean, I don't know that I've ever heard
cattle connected to theslave trade in that way.
Were you surprised whenyou learned about that,
that discovery of the ancient DNA
with North American cattle,
with those connections to West Africa?
- [Karina Vernon] I was shook
because you know, webegan the conversation

(19:54):
talking about me growing up in Alberta,
and of course it's not only cowboys,
but of course cattle that are intrinsic
to the Prairie's self-identity.
And of course I thoughtthat cattle and cowboys
are indigenous to the space.
The culture celebrates themthat that way, you know,
it was only last year when Iturned on CBC radio

(20:19):
and I turned on Quirks and Quarks
because I love listeningto science programmes.
And I happened to hear aninterview with Nicolas Delsol,
who is the scientist
performing this DNA research on cattle.
And he was talking about
realising from the DNA of cattle

(20:40):
that cattle arrived in North America
through the slave trade.
And I was like, so wait a second.
Are you telling me that thewhole story of the cowboy,
the Calgary stampede, et cetera,
is actually celebratingfigures and species

(21:04):
that are African in origin?
Is that what I'm hearing?
It is what I'm hearing.
You know, according to this research,
the first cowboys in theAmericas were African, right?
You know, they werebrought over deliberately.
They were targeted by slave traders
for their knowledge ofworking with cattle species

(21:25):
because in Senegambia, theyhad this millennia long culture
of working with domesticated cattle.
So when I realised that the first cowboys,
and that's the wrong term.
Cowboys, is, that term
comes from an African American context
where African Americanmen were called boys

(21:48):
who worked with cattle, right?
So that derogatory legacyfrom the slavery times,
is built into the terminology.
But when I realised thatthe cowboy figure predated
even the United States as a country,
well that changed the whole story for me.
And so that's where myimagination is right now.

(22:13):
- [Melissa Gismondi] So fortuitous
that you just switched on the radio.
- [Karina Vernon] Oh myGod, all of my research
depends on serendipity,
being at the rightplace at the right time.
(light music)

(22:33):
- [Melissa Gismondi] Well,I want to bring it back
a little bit to songs.
And you mentioned earlier, you know,
we were talking about cattleand the roots of cattle,
and you mentioned that oftenthe songs that cowboys sang,
they were singing
to their cattle.- [Karina Vernon] Right.
- [Melissa Gismondi] Tell me a bit
about their job as cowboysand how that inspired
some of the songs that they were singing.

(22:54):
- [Karina Vernon] So whencowboys were driving cattle
out of Texas, and they weredriving the cattle out of Texas
because Texas grass was dry and shrubby
and they wanted to fattentheir cattle for market,
so they would drive these huge herds,
we're talking aboutthousand head herd of cattle
up to literally greenerpastures to the lusher grasses

(23:18):
of Kansas and Oklahoma, that was an open prairie,
meaning that the prairie wasn't fenced
by anything like barbed wire.
Barbed wire hadn't been invented yet.
And so on that openprairie, if cattle stampeded
for any reason that cattlewas long gone in the night.
So if there were thunderstorms,

(23:39):
if there were coyote,wolves, grizzly bears,
anything like that, sudden noises,
if the cattle were nervous
they were gone and the cowboyscouldn't get them back.
And that was money lost.
So oftentimes the Blackcowboys especially,
were relegated to the jobof the overnight shift

(23:59):
after the cattle werebedded down for the night.
The Black cowboys werenightingale night herders,
that's what they were called.
And it was their job to ridearound and around the herd.
They worked in twos, one riding clockwise
and the other one ridingcounterclockwise around the herd.

(24:19):
And they would singsongs to calm the cattle.
And those were lullabies.
And that's the origin ofcowboy music actually,
lullabies to calm the cattle.
- [Melissa Gismondi] That'sbeautiful, I love that.
- [Karina Vernon] I know.
♪ I thought I would be riding up saddle ♪
♪ And ahoop-ti-hiddle-um-a-yeah-um-a-yeah. ♪

(24:39):
♪ Hoop-ti-hiddle-um-a-yeah. ♪
♪ When I was ridin' and I got stradlin' ♪
♪ And the muse on the rightright up on the saddle. ♪
♪ And thehoop-ti-hiddle-um-a-yeah-um-a-yeah. ♪
♪ Hoop-ti-hiddle-um-a-yeah. ♪
♪ Let me tell you, fivetime a shielding. ♪
♪ Told me right on the foot of the hill. ♪
♪ And ahoop-ti-hiddle-um-a-yeah-um-a-yeah. ♪

(24:59):
♪ With a bum-ti-hiddle-um-a-yeah. ♪
- [Melissa Gismondi] Thatwas Moses "Clear Rock" Platt
singing the traditional cowboy song,
"The Old Chisholm Trail" in 1933.
It's a song born on the cattle drives
that brought Black cowboys
to the Canadian prairies in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries.

(25:22):
These cowboys were usually hired
by large ranching operationsto drive the cattle north.
But then African American farmers
started moving to the Canadian prairies
to set up their own ranches.
I asked Karina why they came.
- [Karina Vernon] Around1910, they came for the land,

(25:44):
the land that had been recently stolen,
expropriated from Indigenous people
during the process ofthe treaty negotiations.
The number treaties were signed in Canada.
And so the federalgovernment was selling off
Indigenous people's land,
and they were inviting Americanfarmers to come up north.

(26:04):
And the Canadian government advertised
in American newspapers.
Accidentally, they ran ads inAfrican-American newspapers
inviting--
- [Melissa Gismondi] Did they not know
that they were doing.
- [Karina Vernon] They didnot know. They did not know.
They said for $10 feeyou could get 160 acres.

(26:25):
- [Melissa Gismondi] Wow.
- [Karina Vernon] And so African Americans
were like, okay, let's go.
They didn't, the Canadiangovernment didn't mention
any racial restrictionsbecause they didn't anticipate
that African Americans would read this.
And so that set up ahuge chain of migration
to the Canadian prairies.

(26:46):
(slow western music)
- [Melissa Gismondi] Soearlier we were talking about
the sort of whitewashing thatgoes on with this history
and also the culture, right?

(27:06):
You were saying actually it'sthe idea of the white cowboy
that is a myth in a way
because it wasn't exclusively that.
And I think this is abinary that we really see
with the violent and racistimagery of cowboys and Indians,
which is all over Hollywood.
I'm wondering how you'vesort of been thinking about
that narrative, you know,of the binary of the cowboys

(27:29):
and Indians in relation tothe figure of the Black cowboy
that sort of moves between
and kind of interrupts that binary.
- [Karina Vernon] That's a great question.
Yeah, of course the west was never
only White and Indigenous, right?
Hollywood has takenthe story of the cowboy
and identified the figure ofthe cowboy with the nation.

(27:53):
And this kind of story aboutthe quest for the west,
the opening up the westwas sort of the story
of the American nation
territorializing on allthat Indigenous land,
on all that stolen Indigenous land.
The story becomes a lot morecomplicated when you realise

(28:14):
that the cowboy figure alsoincluded Black cowboys.
That's a hard, that's a hard story.
And some of the songs kind of work through
that complicated historywhere Black people

(28:36):
and Indigenous people activelybeing displaced at the time
were occupying the same space.
And Black people were witnessing...
That song, "Home on the Range"
we think about that song
as kind of the settlercolonial song, par excellence,
and it's been adoptedas the national anthem

(28:57):
of the American west.
♪ Where the buffalo roam. ♪
♪ Where the deer and the antelope play. ♪
- [Karina Vernon] But when youimagine that the perspective
is actually a Black singer,
that Black singer iswitnessing the displacement

(29:19):
of Indigenous people.
The song is about testifying to that
and being part of the same context,
but also held apart, right?
Not able to sort of reachout toward each other
in that moment and organiseagainst colonialism,

(29:39):
the after lies of slavery
against white supremacy.
♪ Deer and the antelope play. ♪
♪ Where seldom is hearda discouraging word. ♪

(30:01):
♪ And the skies are not cloudy all day. ♪
- [Karina Vernon] So it's asorrowful, really sorrowful...
when I think about Black cowboysdriving cattle northward.
So this non-Indigenous species,along with the displacement

(30:24):
of Indigenous people
that made these cattle drivespossible in the first place,
was also the nearannihilation of the buffalo.
And so one of the thingsthat those cowboys
and Black cowboys were involvedin was kind of replacing
one species for another, right?
And so the ironies uponironies of that history

(30:49):
just resound with me,
that Black people werecaught up in, you know,
what ultimately was asettler colonial project.
It's still a history that I'm,
as you can hear in my voice,that I'm still grappling with
and that is still painfulto think about, yeah.

(31:10):
(solemn western music)
- [Melissa Gismondi] Iam curious what you think
sort of gets lost if you know the stories,
the histories we've beentalking about today, the songs,

(31:31):
what gets lost if these stay underground?
Like what do, what do we lose out on?
- [Karina Vernon] You know, to go back
to the beginning of our conversation,
when I think about whatmy image of a cowboy was
when I was growing up, if we don't claim,
if we don't resurface these stories,

(31:54):
you don't, you fundamentally are robbed
of the history of your own place, right?
And your place within that place.
So if we don't know thestory of the Black cowboys
and we don't know their musical cultures,
then we don't know the story of our place.
We don't know the story of Canada.
We don't know the waythat Canada is connected,

(32:17):
deeply connected to places like Texas
that is in turn connected to West Africa.
Black folks don't know that country music
and cowboy songs are ours, right?
We don't know that thatlegacy is part of our history,
is part of our invention.

(32:39):
We lose our kinships, right?
We lose our kinship relationshipswith our traditions,
with our other than human species.
We lose our records of ourattachments to land, right?
We inherit the lie that wearen't part of this land.

(33:00):
We inherit the lie thatwe don't have 400 years
of connection to lands on Turtle Island,
however complicated those connections are.
And we also lose the incentive
to keep looking in unexpected places
for traces of our history.

(33:22):
And I'm, I've beentalking about Black folks,
but I would say that thesame goes for everybody.
We want to see what historylooks like from the underground.
There are all kinds of waysthat history has been preserved,
and we want our historiesenriched and broadened
by seeing how elsehistory has been mattered.

(33:47):
- [Melissa Gismondi] Soyou mentioned, you know,
the hypothetical drawing ofthe Cowboy when you were young.
And I know you talked aboutsort of feeling like, you know,
you and your sister weremaybe the first, you know,
Black kids in this part of, you know,
Alberta and the Prairies.
But I'm wondering sort of how you feel
or if you feel any differentlynow about your roots
in the Prairies now having done, you know,

(34:10):
a lot of this research andstarting to look into it.
- [Karina Vernon] Yeah, this research
has been transformative for me
in every way, in every way possible.
I found a language from my experience.
I can now say forinstance, Black Prairies.
And I kind of claim that as an identity.

(34:30):
You know, I'm a Black prairie person.
I can claim a genealogy thatI belong to a long history
and that makes a difference.
I claim a community now.
I know like John Warewasn't alone in his moment.
I know that my experience belongs
to this common historyinstead of an I there's a we.

(34:53):
And that itself is transformative.
I find echoes when I'mreading about the cowboys
and I'm listening to theirsongs, I feel a closeness
and a kinship with them.
There's ways that theybelong... in complicated ways...
to that land that I feel a connection to.

(35:18):
- [Melissa Gismondi] I thinkthat is a great place to end.
But I want to ask, in casewe didn't get at anything
that you think is really important
or anything else you would add
to any of what we talked about.
- [Karina Vernon] I loved your questions.
Thanks for offering me an opportunity
to unspool my thinking.
This is all sort of brand new research

(35:39):
and I'm just sort of, asyou can hear in my answers,
I'm just kind of likethinking my way through it.
- [Melissa Gismondi] No, thank you.
And I realise as you yourself
and others are stillsort of thinking through,
which I realise requires a little bit,
maybe a lot, of courage to say,but I'm going to go out there
and be public with my thinking,

(36:00):
which is usually academics, right?
We wait till, here's myarticle that's been published.
And so I appreciate that you'rewilling to sort of be open
with the thinking and the process.
- [Karina Vernon] I guessI'm keen to share this stuff
because I love these Black cowboys,
I love them.
They're not me,

(36:21):
but it's amazing to methat they left a trace
of their experience in the song
and that a hundred years later,almost, I get to hear them.
You know, that's amazing to me.
(slow western music)

(36:48):
- [Melissa Gismondi] Karina Vernon
is associate professor of English
at the University ofToronto's Scarborough campus.
She was a JHI Faculty ResearchFellow from 2024 to 2025.
The music you heard in thisepisode was "Home on the Range"
performed by James Richardsonfrom the collection,
John and Ruby Lomax, 1939Southern States recording trip

(37:11):
at the Library of Congress.
The lyrics were writtenby Brewster M. Higley
and the music by Daniel E. Kelly.
"The Old Chisholm Trail"and "St. James Hospital"
were performed by Moses "Clear Rock" Platt,
there from the Alan Lomax Collection
at the Library of Congress
and available on the album Black Texicans,

(37:32):
Balladeers and Songstersof the Texas Frontier.
You'll find links to these sources
in the podcast description.
Humanities at Large is produced
by the Jackman Humanities Institute
at the University of Toronto.
If you enjoyed this conversation,don't keep it to yourself.
Share this episode witha friend or colleague

(37:53):
and be sure to hit the follow button
so you never miss an episode.
I'm Melissa Gismondi and I'llbe back again in two weeks.
Thanks for listening.
(light music)