Make America ‘Cowboy’ Again: ‘Yellowstone’ star wants Americans to get out and VOTE



A true cowboy takes his hat off before dinner, in honor of the meal before him and the people who have provided it.

Forrie J. Smith from the hit show “Yellowstone” is one of these true blue cowboys with deep rancher roots, and he has some serious wisdom to impart to Glenn Beck of “The Glenn Beck Podcast” — as well as the rest of the country.

When Smith was a kid, he helped his grandfather take care of their cattle. However, he wasn’t so sure what the point of it all was.

“He looks at me with, ‘Well, son, we’re helping feed America. We’re helping feed our country,’ and that’s kind of the cowboy culture right there,” he tells Glenn. “We’re helping feed our country, we’re maintaining the grass and rotating our pasture to keep everything right.”


While there’s no doubt there’s an incredibly important purpose to the jobs of ranchers and farmers, the government has repeatedly attempted to hurt them through absurd rules and regulations — and it’s only getting worse.

“Another thing, Glenn, that really gets me is the cow farts,” Smith says. “We used to have 60 million buffalo and no telling how many elk running across the plains.”

“And they were farting animals,” Glenn laughs, though he notes that bison aren’t just good for farts. “There are no pure bison except in Yellowstone, and it’s my understanding that they sometimes thin the herd, and they just kill them instead of giving them to ranches so we can have pure-bred buffalo. The only pure buffalo or bison is owned by the government.”

“All of these people going hungry,” Smith says, disturbed. “It’s about one of the best meats you can eat.”

Not only is the government cracking down on meat born, raised, and butchered in the United States, but more of our meat is now coming from outside the country.

“30% of our beef now comes out of Brazil,” Smith explains. “We don’t know what has been done to it, you know, what did they inject in it before it got butchered, how are they butchering it, we have no clue.”

But it’s not just the agriculture industry that has Smith worried.

“I’m really scared of what’s going to happen after the election,” he tells Glenn. “I get around the country a lot more than I used to, and I’m meeting a lot of people and I talk to them about voting. And they’re like, ‘I ain't voting any more; I’m just buying more bullets.’”

“That’s one of the things that’s wrong with this country right now, is people don’t stand up. We just keep getting along,” he continues, adding, “I just want to spread that feeling: ‘Hey, we’re Americans.'”

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Wednesday Western: SJ Dahlstrom



Wilder Good

Crowds shuffled through Arlington, a city of roller coasters and stadiums. The jumbotron declared that the temperature was nearing triple digits. It was June, after all, when Texas heat tightens its grip on the air.

Novelist/poet Nathan Dahlstrom and his son had driven here from Lubbock. Over the course of their five-hour trek, they played John Wayne DVDs on repeat.

And I drove from Oklahoma with my 4-year-old daughter, who was giddy on her first road trip.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

We met at Globe Life Field, where the Texas Rangers faced the New York Mets. Neither of our kids had been to an MLB game before. What a distinctly American rite of passage.

This convergence of fathers had all the markings of Nathan’s Western-tinged fiction and poetry, composed under the pen name S.J. Dahlstrom.

In an era when libraries have allowed the creep of ideology to spoil words and undermine literacy, Nathan delivers characters and scenes with backbone. He tells stories the way people used to, before popular art and literature fell to political whimsy.

Nathan’s books feature wise mentors who transform weak adults into protectors so that they can lead their children to wisdom. Strong families, sworn to unity.

Nathan is devoted to this upbuilding, where love is a matter of construction. He employs this in many ways, right down to his guidance as a creative writing teacher.

But here I am straying from his clearest advice: Don’t try to produce a message. Just tell the story, and maybe a message will appear.

Range life

The Rangers average 30,000 spectators at home games. There was a bright excitement to the atmosphere. Less than a year ago, the Rangers won their first World Series, finally able to hoist the Commissioner's Trophy.

The closed roof of the ballpark intensified the feeling that we — thousands of us waiting for fireworks — were as small and frantic as ants, color-coded and primitive. Bursts of high-intensity songs blasted out at random. Fans shrieked at cheerleaders with T-shirt cannons. It was a disorienting but electric setting for a pre-interview.

Nathan wore his trademark cowboy hat, a long-sleeve Wrangler pearl-snap, and cargo shorts. We lifted our hands to our hearts for the national anthem, and our kids followed our example.

The next morning, we would sit down for an interview at Mercury Studios, home of Blaze Media.

Nathan and I had originally planned to meet months earlier, in Oklahoma City, for the Western Heritage Awards, where Nathan won a Wrangler award, his fourth.

But a nasty virus struck the Ryan household, and I had to cancel my trip.

Nathan sent me a few updates from the ceremony and dinner, including pictures with John Wayne’s children.

We got along immediately, with a shared love for the 1962 John Wayne-Jimmy Stewart film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." Coincidentally, that week, it was the feature Wednesday Western.

Without ever saying it, we also share a love for the writing of 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, the first existentialist, who was a Christian, meaning that the basis of existentialism, a supposedly atheistic philosophy, is in fact centered on Christ.

In fact, Kierkegaard was alarmed by claims about the decline of Christianity. He wrote, “In the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human.” Kierkegaard describes reality as a tool God uses to teach us, guided only by His presence.

Be wilder

Nathan crafts lean stories that are carefully flowered with philosophy and grit. Reading them feels smooth, like floating down a river. They thrive with Hemingway’s deceptive minimalism.

It’s so easy to zip through a chapter, to land on a closing sentence that grips you. He weaves scenes full of emotion and upheaval and beauty and love, always cinematic. His characters might seem unremarkable in a market saturated with bizarre fantasy and surreptitious politics. But these sacred nobodies understand the fragility of life.

It’s only a matter of time before some wild creative turns the series into a TV show or movie. I believe that it would be a phenomenal hit. The Wall Street Journal included Nathan’s work on a list of children's books featuring "grit, audacity, and imagination."

Wilder Good is a 12-year-old boy with two married parents and a sister. Nathan modeled Wilder Good on himself, drawing from his own childhood. He grew up on a small ranch, surrounded by miles of unbroken nature, his private frontier. He learned to become a cowboy. His family attended a Church of Christ three times a week.

Compare this to Disney’s prolific use of characters without families. A whopping 30 Disney movies include variations of dead parents, roughly half of the company’s 62 animated films. Alongside animal sidekicks, dead or missing parents are quite possibly the most prevailing theme in Disney movies.

Why? If it’s merely a literary device or an irremovable part of the Disney formula, then it’s bad writing. Pure laziness.

But what if it’s more? As a cultural journalist, it intrigues me. As a writer, it annoys me. As an armchair philosopher, it fascinates or bores me — I can’t decide. As a parent, as a father, it riles me up with a special indignation.

Nathan offers an escape from Disney’s bizarre mythology. As Wilder’s mother tells him in "Texas Grit," while discussing her cancer treatment, “Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and get mad and hold on.”

Wilder Good is a hunter who loves riding horses and exploring the wild. As a result, we see the emotional complexity of the hunter who shoots Bambi.

The Wilder Good series opens with "The Elk Hunt," Wilder’s chance to use his grandpa’s 270 Winchester rifle. The book was a finalist for the 2016 Lamplighter Triple Crown Awards.

"Texas Grit" followed, winning the 2015 Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award for Young Readers. In it, Wilder gains even greater emotional depth, a strengthening of his resilience. You can see Nathan stretching out a little as he tells the story.

The downpour of awards began with his fourth volume, "The Green Colt," which garnered Nathan’s first Wrangler Award and his second Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, as well as two finalist honors.

Nathan opens the book with an extended soliloquy, an almost stream-of-consciousness monologue by Papa Milam, Wilder’s grandpa. It’s longer than the previous Wilder Good novels, marking a shift in Nathan’s style and process, an advance in his creative play.

"Black Rock Brothers," the fifth, earned him a Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award. With his sixth, "Silverbelly," he was back to Gold. "Black Rock Brothers" also started his three-year streak of winning the Wrangler Award.

The seventh, "Cow Boyhood," also earned him another Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award.

His most recent Wrangler Award-winning book, "Heartwood Mountain," marks the eighth installment in his Wilder Good series. By now, Wilder Good is minted, heroic. Nathan doesn’t even begin the book with Wilder, in an adventurous approach.

Paramount

A former Paramount hub, Mercury Studios is the largest TV and film studio in Middle America.

It's the site for scenes in "JFK," "Walker, Texas Ranger," "Talk Radio," "Leap of Faith," "Prison Break," and — my favorite — the children’s show "Barney & Friends" — one of Barney’s beloved tree-mendous trees slumps outside Stage 19. It also served as the platform for music videos by an array of artists, including Garth Brooks, Phil Collins, Guns N’ Roses, and the Backstreet Boys.

Nathan and I chatted on one of the many couches in the 75-foot-ceilinged hallway.

We discussed the importance of creating redemptive and edifying but most of all entertaining children's literature, the influence of the Bible on personal lives and literary works, and the craft of writing. We shared our experiences and insights on mentorship, storytelling, and living a meaningful life. We discussed the role of leadership and governance in society, as seen in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," and the ability of the Western genre to explore the concept of the ideal man.

We lauded the fruits of creativity, hard work, and living life fully in the pursuit of success and personal growth.We pondered masculinity, discernment, order through wildness, and even kung-fu wisdom.

The searchers

Nathan grasps an ancient ritual of elders who mentor the youth. It’s one of the most unwavering themes throughout his work, often performed by the wise old man who guides boys to manhood and men to humility.

In Nathan’s case, this mentorship was also creative and professional. His friendship with John R. Erickson, author of the “Hank the Cowdog” series, launched him into a writing career. John Erickson taught Nathan how to use his gift, although first he had to find it. Nathan has done the same in turn, many times over.

He co-founded Whetstone Boys Ranch, a boys' home and boarding school that offers therapeutic ranching to troubled young men.

But this quality is also evinced with his own son, a wonderful, sharp young man who gives me hope for the future of our nation. It was cool to see their connection. They have a special bond, as if they can understand one another in a million unspoken ways. They could just as easily be the father and son from Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road," navigating a post-apocalyptic hellscape, always with a sense of continuity.

Nathan loves Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and John Wayne, but most of all, he loves Christ Jesus. This is the height of manliness.

There are plenty of nonsensical rules in society. One of them is that creatives stand on one side of the battlefield and frontiersmen on the other. Nathan Dahlstrom upends this paradigm. Because the reality is quite the opposite: If a man can fight — and he ought to know how — he certainly better know how to speak, how to translate his emotions, how to be gentle, how to be kind, and how to honor women without degrading his masculinity.

Then there’s the gentleness of fatherhood, an experience that requires a man to be tender. But other times, a father must be a brute. A man has to bleed.

In one poem, Nathan describes “the glory of men talking low” as they wait for a hunt. You can hear that silence.

He likes to say that he’s “interested in all things outdoors and creative, he writes poetry while bowhunting and collects wildflower seeds when doing ranch work.” That description is fantastic. It should be a common goal among men, balancing nature with art.

He lives by the twin mottos "be Wilder" and "find beauty."

“Whetstones: 40 Manly Poems” is a chapbook themed around masculinity, although he certainly doesn’t exclude the role of girls and women.

Some of it is written using couplets or quatrains, with the formal rhyme schemes of ballads and sonnets. There’s also free verse, gorgeous lines like, “We held our cowboy hats to our bellies / as the wind stirred / the fall-yellowed cottonwoods / in the canyon below us.”

He writes, “Only hidden beauty is true.”

When creating their art, writers, poets, and musicians all must decide: Will my music conform to truth? Or does my truth conform to music? Most take the latter. It’s far easier. Great music arrives unexpectedly. It is forever passing through. Truth, however, does not bend so easily. It’s rigorous and unchanging.

Before having children, I saw life in abstractions, colors, melodies, poems. But then my kids changed everything into poetry. I used to understand only the potential of life. Now I see the endlessness of love.

The Ranch

It’s a joke at Mercury Studios: If someone’s in town, you take them to the Ranch, the finest steakhouse near the Blaze Media headquarters. Some of my colleagues groan at the mention of it. But not me. The cowboy ribeye and meat and cheese platter alone are worth any wait.

So naturally, we all went to the Ranch after our interview. My dad, my sister, my daughter, Nathan, and his son. My only regret is that we didn’t record the conversation. It centered largely on truth.

Nathan values authenticity. A real man, an authentic man, is both rough and gentle. An outdoorsman. A hunter. But equally a lyricist and a gardener.

Nathan is well educated, with a major in Bible studies and a minor in Greek. He’s incredibly well read. Yet he urges young folks to reject the absolutism of a college degree. An education can only have a heart if you also pursue the wildness of life and the order of nature. This theme courses through Nathan’s work: A rich education too often leads to pride; humility is better than credentials from the most impressive universities.

As the waiter began pulling plates from the table, Nathan quietly announced that one or all of us had to finish the meat. (No problem.) There’s something violent about tossing meat into the trash.

Nathan often explores this sacred connection to God’s lower creations. His first novel, "The Elk Hunt," contains vivid scenes driven by this tension. He applies a brokenhearted philosophy to the examination in his poem, “Watching a Deer Get Killed.”

In another, he describes cats with a funny disdain, “Something about their smell / and blasé nonchalance / doesn't seem American / seems arrogant without achievement. / Seems French.”

Humor aside, his reverence for animals is constant.

The truth of nature isn’t growth or motion; it’s self-preservation, followed by the hope of redemption. Life always fights to survive, or at least to have had a chance.

Wilder Good captures all of this, without guttering into condescension. He intuits the still sad music of humanity reflected in nature. Then there’s what nature does to herself, her red-clawed destruction, only, in the next breath, to sigh to us with a breeze. As Dante writes, we are calmed by “the bond of love that nature makes.”

The paradox doesn’t end.

Wilder Good is at peace in nature. But he also understands the painful realities of hunting. Killing is unnatural. Yet life can’t function without it. Look at Genesis 3:21: God provides Adam and Eve with clothing … made of animal hide, of skin. In order to survive, we have to continually destroy other creatures’ chance at survival. But this is not as bleak as it sounds.

In "Texas Grit," as Wilder crosses through untouched nature, he muses, “The world seemed as fresh and raw as it must have been at the beginning.”

Wednesday Western: The top Western social media accounts



Social media has played an interesting role in the revival of Western cinema. I’ve compiled a list of social media accounts dedicated to Westerns.

This article doesn’t include blogs, podcasts, websites, or magazines. I’m currently working on an article for each, so definitely let me know any of these that I need to know about in the comments section, or send me an email.

The following list is by no means comprehensive. And at first glance, it may seem like a random assortment. The accounts vary in audience size, output, and content organization. They employ different media and delivery methods. Some are public; some require you to answer a questionnaire. Each of them is unique.

What unites them is a frontier spirit, a liveliness.

Official John Wayne - Instagram

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of The Duke.

The official John Wayne Instagram page is probably my favorite Western social media account. The X account is also solid. But the Instagram account is far better.

It delivers the perfect number and flow of posts. And the descriptions, titles, and photos are all flawlessly assembled. I’d be shocked if it weren’t run by social media or marketing/PR professionals.

This is the proper handling of the John Wayne legacy. The people in charge of maintaining it make sure that the Duke’s legacy is truly an experience. All of it is interconnected through John Wayne Enterprises: the John Wayne Museum, the John Wayne Cancer Foundation, the John Wayne Grit Series, among others.

You can buy John Wayne cookbooks and a collection of cocktail recipes, coffee, ornamental cups and top-class clothing — all of which will appear in this series in exciting ways.

All of these converge at the Instagram account.

It’s comforting to see a passionate group of people devoted to the upkeep of the Duke’s invaluable legacy.

If all that weren’t good enough, they just launched a collaboration with Broken Bow Country, a friend of the Wednesday Western series, as captured in this profile.

Broken Bow Country: Meet the 17-year-old behind a viral Western clothing brandwww.theblaze.com

In fact, during our interview, we connected on the Duke and our admiration for the official John Wayne account.

Scrolling through this account, it feels like you’re reading a biography of the Duke, told in vignettes and accompanied by pictures, music, and video.

Some of the posts are simply gorgeous. They provide a holistic view of the Duke, a man unlike any other. They offer great commentary on various Wayne films and media appearances. They help you understand who John Wayne was behind the legend, as in this post about his prolific love of chess.

Other times, it’s playful, as with the incredibly creative inclusion of holidays, like this recent celebration of National Sunglasses Day.

The posts hit every emotion as we navigate John Wayne’s love life and comforts and disappointments and truest victories.

And America, you become closer to this great country. Just check out this 4th of July post. And, man, how about this one? Who else deserves to be the biggest movie star of all time?

Just Westerns - YouTube

Just Westerns is an entrepreneurial feat animated by one man’s love for Westerns. He has mastered the possibilities that YouTube offers.

And that narrator’s voice: That’s Marc Reynard, the Englishman in charge of Just Westerns, the unofficial home of Westerns on YouTube.

This dude is undoubtedly one of us.

He examines the genre from creative and at times surprising angles, like this video about the fate of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly 2.” You read that right: There was supposed to be a sequel.

His videos are smooth, well produced, well crafted, well written, sharp, fun, lovely, informative.

He also does something that I wish we had more of: He hypes upcoming and anticipated Westerns and compiles year-end lists and legitimizes the artistic merit of video games: “20 Best Western Video Games.” He also covers Wednesday Western favorite "Old Henry" (2021)

We need more of all of this. Best of all, you can feel his passion.

My only complaint is that the channel has only 30 videos. I went through them all at a steady clip.

But even this turns out to be further proof that you’re getting content that is authentically wholesome. Marc addresses it in his YouTube bio: “Please bear with me, I am a solo creator without the resources or manpower that larger channels typically have, so I am unfortunately unable to upload as regularly as I like, especially as I am committed to prioritizing quality over quantity.”

Take your time, brother. Personally, I think it's worth the wait.

r/Westerns - Reddit

Reddit can be a nasty place, especially if your politics are anything to the right of Bernie Sanders. And you can’t avoid the ideological slapfests, either. Leftist goons stir it up in every subreddit, constantly, and they’re almost always combative, even in the subreddits devoted to woodwork or kittens.

The Westerns subreddit is a clear exception. It’s a community. It feels like the town square of a dust-ridden Western town.

Check out this thread about “For a Few Dollars More.”

The mixed-media format of Reddit allows for a variety of sources: pictures, movies, trailers, interviews, text-only, even gifs. It might be the most versatile resource on this list.

It’s a great place for recommendations and commentary. Unlike much of the rest of Reddit, which is disproportionately loaded with young white liberal men, there’s an even spread of people of all ages.

These Redditors routinely swap personal stories about the various movies and actors. Some of their stories are poignant and evocative.

Back to the Old Western - Facebook

Facebook is a great place for Western fans. Instagram is too image-centered to accommodate text, and it doesn’t support links. Meanwhile, the microblogging experience of X is limited in its scope and impatient in its daunting pace — the temperament and vibe of Westerns don’t do well in such a frantic environment.

Facebook circumnavigates all of this, finally able to beat all the much lighter apps. For once, it finds an advantage to its cluttered user interface.

This bulk allows users to upload and share every type of content. No limitations. It’s the only platform capable of this, besides Reddit, but I’m not about to equate the megalith Facebook with the niche subreddit.

Besides, Facebook outperforms Reddit anyway. Its Pages function allows for an immersive blogging experience, run by moderators and admins who are passionate about their content and free to run their operation without much interference, right down to the parameters of the group’s privacy.

Back to the old western | Charles Bronson as Chino in classic western film 'The Valdez Horses' in 1973 | Facebookwww.facebook.com

Back to the Old Western is the perfect example of these principles. It is active, with a constant flow of posts, often aggregated from fan pages — the Duke and Sam Elliot, mostly.

The comments sections are fairly quiet, but most of the time people add substance or passion to the movie or actor being celebrated.

Chatter isn’t as important as it is on Reddit. The admins really know their stuff, offering a healthy range of mainstream Westerns, cult classics, and oddities, like this post celebrating Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale for their roles in “The Legend of Frenchie King” (1971), a wild little movie that will get its Wednesday Western spotlight in due time.

A Word on Westerns - YouTube

BLAZING SADDLES! The fart scene changed my life, says Burton Gilliam A WORD ON WESTERNSwww.youtube.com

I made a point to place Just Westerns higher up than A Word on Westerns, because Just Westerns is the passion project of an ordinary guy who loves Westerns, while A Word on Westerns is a proper television series. An exceedingly good one, with just as much passion and gusto.

It’s a fantastic channel. A Word on Westerns is sort of like a Western-only version of TMC, which is a thrilling reality. That’s the dream.

The channel features entire movies, each with a brief but thorough introduction by Rob Word, a double feature as part of the segment Word’s Wayback.

These are mostly 1930s and 1940s Westerns.

YouTube is an oddity on this list, because so many of the major Western channels exclusively post full movies. What a joy it is to find a rare Western on YouTube. But these channels lack the commentary and artistry that characterize the two YouTube channels I’ve included on this list.

A Word on Westerns blends the rustic ease of the Old West with the hypersonic immediacy of our infinite now. You can also access lectures, speeches, and clever projects like this "Gunsmoke" mash-up.

Smartest of all, it makes good use of the Shorts function on YouTube, will brief clips about various topics, from Robert Mitchum to stories of mutilation.

Western Podcast - X

The Western Podcast X page is small but mighty, with some impressive followers and praise from True West magazine.

Have you seen #HorizonAmericanSaga yet? If so, share your thoughts with us! We'll record a full podcast episode about the film in two weeks when Andrew is back from his vacation in Europe. In the meantime, here's Matt's highly positive take on Kevin Costner's latest Western epic. https://t.co/baVzZE4vPK
— @WesternPodcast (@WesternPodcast) June 28, 2024

It’s an offshoot of the marvelous podcast hosted by our friend Western apostle Andrew Patrick Nelson and the excellent Matthew Chernov, a screenwriter and a journalist with bylines in Variety, Entertainment Weekly, IMBd.com. Yahoo News, and about a hundred other outlets. His insight thrives with the joy of curiosity.

Andrew's Instagram account will keep you up to date with his media appearances and projects, with the occasional infusion of Hair Metal.

These boys are the real deal. Andrew just began his new job as chief curator of Western Spirit, Scottsdale's Museum of the West. Before that, he taught film history. As a professor at the University of Utah, Andrew guided his students through the badlands full of robbers and coyotes, only to unmask the villains hiding behind all their props and plywood scenery.

Why Millennials & Zoomers Should Watch Westerns | Andrew Patrick Nelson | Alignwww.youtube.com

Both of them are impressively smart with a tenderness for beauty, but not at the cost of a good story or a complicated hero.

They take their time with content, even tweets, but this adds to the reverence of their decision-making process. If you haven't taken the dive into their work already, do it.They have a gift for revealing the beautiful, intricate paradoxes of Western movies. They speak with screenwriters, historians, authors, journalists, musicians, directors, costume designers, and more.

They tell stories. They examine personal reactions to various films. They navigate themes of universality and timelessness within the motion of transcendence, while also exposing the flimsiness of any given cultural era.

Is Stagecoach the best movie ever made? Interview with Andrew Patrick Nelsonwww.youtube.com

They have a gift for discerning the role of Western movies in relation to our unexplained world, differentiating these fictions from their context and influence. But also, more impressively, they succeed in witnessing the presence of our entire universe in one tiny section of cinema history.

Both of them have helped yours truly at many points along our journey so far. They have guided me through the desert more than once.

Kevin Costner and Modern West - X

Kevin Costner & MW (@modernwest) on X

Kevin Costner & MW (@modernwest) on Xx.com

Kevin Costner is this era’s Clint Eastwood. He fights to keep the Western in public view, devoting himself to projects animated by passion, even if his wallet takes a hit. The victory is worth the risk.

He has ushered in a new era for the genre. His success with "Yellowstone" and its Western universe of shows has accelerated the Western’s resurgence. But it’s more than that. We're also witnessing a flourishing of the Western as an ethos, a style, a mode of thought, an approach to life.

So did you realize that Kevin Costner has a country band? Founded in 2007, Kevin Costner and Modern West deliver rowdy songs written for the culturally forgotten people of America. The band's history is tinged with tragedy.

The Kevin Costner and Modern West account is technically the band’s, but it posts tons of Costner content, all hand-picked and polished by a team of social media professionals.

Best Cowboy Movies Forever - Facebook

Best cowboy movies forever | Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, and Van Heflin in "Shane" (1953) | Facebookwww.facebook.com

There are several variations on the “Western” + “Forever” title, but I’m going with Best Cowboy Movies Forever. I enjoy the way the account profiles various actors, like this post about Lee Van Cleef.

It also includes Westerns from every different era. This is important. It’s good to hop around in this way. I’m partial to the 1939-1960 era of the genre, so I can plant myself in that time exclusively if I’m not careful.

The page rarely ventures into the current scene. But this isn’t a problem. It’s important to offer due reverence to the originators.

Old West - Actors, Films, and Legends - Facebook

www.facebook.com

Old West zooms in so that we get a portrait view of an incredible variety of Western actors, films, and legends, like this post devoted to Myron Halle or this homage to Elsa Martinelli. I value any source that prioritizes the lesser-known figures in the genre. Because, as we all know, the Western genre is overflowing with stories, entire generations of actors, producers, directors, screenwriters — you name it — whose fascinating tales deserve to be recounted.

As much as I love the giants of the genre, I derive incredible joy from learning about these forgotten figures.

Passion for Western Movies - Instagram

Passion for Western Movies makes great use of Instagram’s Reels format.

The account does a lot of this kind of multi-movie post, offering a list of movies connected by timeframe or theme.

Passion for Western Movies lives up to its name, able to glide around the history of the Western genre, seemingly without partiality. It also features lesser-known movies, like this post about "The Hunting Party," which features Gene Hackman.

Broken Bow Country - Instagram

I’m a bit biased on this one, because I think Colton is an absolute legend, but Broken Bow Country is perfect for this list.

The Western experience you get is fairly rough around the edges, in a distinctly modern way. But modernity never wins against Broken Bow Country.

It’s unique for many reasons but primarily because, in addition to its Western ethos, it is a clothing retailer and printmaker. No other creator on our list offers this level of art and style.

Then you’ve got the lore, the storytelling that comes with his posts, the war hymns of country-Western rebels and the toll their rebellion often took on their lives.

The past month has been wild for Colton. Early in July, he landed a collaboration with John Wayne Enterprises. The T-shirts are fantastic. In fact, I’m wearing one of them in the cover photo for Wednesday Western.

Then, a gunman on a sloped roof tried to murder former President Donald Trump, who was days away from officially accepting his party’s nomination.

In the panicky hours that followed, many people succumbed to their emotions, others to their resolve. I won’t pretend to have remained cool.

But Colton did. Following the Trump assassination attempt, he designed a T-shirt honoring one of the most American moments in human history, as Trump rose with his fist in the air. And he donated all of the money to a charity for Corey Comperatore, the man who died shielding his family from one of the gunman’s bullets.

This was a controversial move. He even faced the nasty comments about how the shooter shouldn’t have missed or that the deaths of the victims were “completely deserved.”

He lost a few thousand followers, but he describes it as “inconsequential when you think about the people that it's helping to support.”

In a press release, he said, “This has nothing to do with politics, I was incredibly moved by what happened and I wanted to use my platform to do something that extended beyond the controversy and the arguing.”

Lancer TV Blog - Facebook

Last and certainly not least, Lancer TV Blog on Facebook. It is run by a friend of mine, an avid supporter of Wednesday Western.

Unlike every other entry included on this list, Lancer TV Blog focuses entirely on one show, a show that hardly anyone knows. This reversal in focus is good for a movie lover’s mental sharpness.

I’m working on a deep dive into "Lancer," so I won’t say too much.

Beyond the merits of the show and its cast, "Lancer" is an underdog story still in the middle stages, badgered by uncertainty. Because the show hasn’t had a reboot, despite success throughout its two (long) seasons on CBS. So it’s not an issue of merit; the show deserves a second wind. It would very likely expand its audience.

But none of that matters for the art trapped in the murk of a waiting area, a zone of uncertainty. And the gifted athlete eventually starts to wobble. Filmstock degrades. All technology collapses. Call it the inevitable disintegration of a lively body, in this case a body of art.

Even the most perfect masterpieces eventually crumble. But what if that happens to be your masterpiece? What if it’s your tiny heaven, all tangled up in red tape? Life has enough of this disintegration as it is. Our entertainment needs to be clean, enjoyable, and easily accessible. Or so claims the majority.

Well, thank God for the passionate workers of cultural excavation. They dig and fight. They protect, sustain, and preserve. Without them, life would be less beautiful. Without them, our society would be weaker and tamer and less able to see a way out.

"Lancer" episodes run an hour. This extended run time fundamentally changes the character and depth of a TV show. It’s amazing what an episode can accomplish in one hour that it simply can’t in 30 minutes.

What you’ll find, as you scroll through the posts on the Lancer Facebook page, is purity. This fandom rewards people with a tiny kingdom, a crafted world they can always turn to. That experience should rile up every single person.

There’s a fidelity to their affection that is heartwarming. The Lancer TV Blog connects you to this incredibly pure relation. It’s just there, like sand across the winds of time.

Ignore The Critics And Watch The First Installment Of ‘Horizon: An American Saga’

The first chapter of Kevin Costner's new Western epic has a lot more to offer than its critical and financial woes suggest.

Every American should own a pair of Anderson Bean boots



Cowboy boots likely originated in 16th-century Spain. From there, they made it to Mexico, an essential part of the vaquero’s uniform. But it wasn’t until they wound up on the feet of frontier Americans that they became truly iconic.

As student of the Western, I thought it behooved me to know something about the legendary footwear that won the West.

Every American Should Own a Pair of Anderson Bean Bootswww.youtube.com

So I set out to find the most authentically American bootmakers in business.

It has been a humbling experience. I’ve discovered that I know very little about cowboy boots. I was originally going to feature Ariat Boots. I own a pair. They’ve gotten me through some vital moments: shoveling snow and trenching through floodwater yet also working perfectly at a wedding or funeral.

Let’s just say that after dealing with Ariat as a company, I no longer feel the same. It's a blessing in disguise, prompting me to venture into the unknown.

So I set out to learn about real cowboy boots. I polled a lot of people: What are the most American boots available?

I also discovered that I know a lot of people who know a lot about boots. My surveying led to three clear winners.

Third place was Lucchese. I spoke with someone on the company's media/PR team who was incredibly nice but in a somewhat off-putting way. Lucchese crafts breathtaking boots. But the price tag is enough to make you woozy. So to be fair, I can only afford to try them on. A few of the people I talked to said that Luccheses are the only boots they’ll wear.

The Duke wore them, and so did Gene Autry.

Tecovas came in second. Affordability, for one. $300 isn't outrageous for boots — good boots. I recently visited a Tecovas store in Austin, Texas. Quality gear. I never heard back from any of the company's publicists.

But one company earned the most votes by far: Anderson Bean Boots. A co-worker even connected me to Ryan Vaughan, the CEO. Before we began the interview, we prayed. It was lovely.

The conversation flowed in a blessed way. I walked away certain not only that he’s a good man and a God-loving man but also that he is at the helm of one of the more interesting small businesses I’ve encountered.

And by “small,” I mean that the company is devoted to crafting boots that will last a lifetime. Anderson Bean’s gorgeous footwear is truly handmade at the Rios Family factories in Mercedes, Texas.

Over the course of 30 minutes, Ryan and I discussed why he loves the boot business, the importance of retailers, and the demands of outfitting the Michael Jordans of horse training.

ALIGN: So I polled a ton of people to determine the best boot, and they overwhelmingly said, “Anderson Bean.”

RYAN VAUGHAN: Well, that's always music to our ears. It's nice when people can appreciate it, too, but that's obviously not what we're in it for. You bring up a bigger mission, and we always say we're not saving lives here, but we're trying to create opportunities. And that was actually felt at one point that I might be called to full -time ministry work and went and did a come-and-see weekend.

I figured out that the Lord said there's other ways that you can serve me, by plugging back into our community here and community service and then leading this company and trying to create opportunities.

I want a better way of life for everybody involved. Our core values, the first one is we will honor God in all that we do. And then we'll do the right thing when nobody is looking, and we go through the quality and supporting our retail partners. But we've got 235 lives that depend on what we're doing here, and families, and making sure that they can see what doing business the right way is. And hopefully the way I love my wife and love my kids and serve and [we] serve each other. So it's a tremendous responsibility.

There's a reason why there's not a lot of footwear manufacturing left in the U.S. You've got to do things the right way, and thankfully we've got people that respect it. We just had our human resource department put together a little list the other day. We've got 62 employees that have been with us for 10 years or more, and then you get up into the 40, and we've got three guys that have been with us 50 years or more. You get in, I think 12 in the 40 range, and that doesn't happen overnight. My father-in-law created an incredible foundation in this industry. So it's a heavy load to carry, but it's well worth it. Like I said at the beginning, when you follow God's will and go where he plants you, it's fun to grow there.

ALIGN: What does the title “Rios of Mercedes” mean, and how did that get started?

VAUGHAN: So the Rios family has been making boots since 1853. They started down in Mexico and came up to the border area of South Texas around the turn of the century. That was kind of when the border was getting secured. We had the U.S. military down here setting up Fort Brown and Fort Ringgold and Brownsville and Rio Grande City and policing to try to protect and try to create some opportunities for farming to come down to South Texas and take advantage of what we call the Magic Valley, which is a fertile valley area along the Rio Grande River here.

Zeferino Rios and his family moved up here to follow the money, and Zeferino settled in the town of Mercedes, which is the town where we still are, and his brother Abraham went up to Raymondville. So Abraham was Rios of Raymondville.

He really focused on making boots for the ranching families up in the cattle areas of Texas, and then Zeferino's family really focused on a lot of the dressier boots for all of the Midwestern folks that were moving down here to raise cotton and farm and vegetables and stuff. So that's the Rios of Mercedes. So yeah, a lot of people think it's Rio, Rio Grande River, but it's Rios of Mercedes.

ALIGN: That’s a classy name right there.

VAUGHAN: Yeah, any time I'm checking into a hotel and I tell them my email address, they always think I'm like a Mercedes-Benz dealer or something. (Laughs)

ALIGN: So are you from South Texas?

VAUGHAN: Yeah, from the Valley, my family's four generations down here. We were one of those families that came down here to farm. My great-grandfather was a cotton farmer, and they were up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, further north than that, moved down. And my grandfather ended up buying into a chain auto parts store called Burton Auto Supply, which was a store that started in 1919 down here. And my brother is still running it. My dad and uncles took it over, and then my brother runs it.

ALIGN: How did you wind up at the helm of Anderson Bean Boots? Take me back to the beginning.

VAUGHAN: My family was in the auto parts business. So we didn't really do a lot of ranch-y stuff. We were more neighborhood kids, played baseball. We had a big old half-pipe ramp in our back yard. We skateboarded and played football and soccer and everything, basketball. And my brother started chasing a gal in high school. She was a barrel racer, and he got in the show and cattle. He was four years older than me and doing the show cattle thing.

And so after I got out of junior high and moved into high school, I followed right in his footsteps and started doing that, at the FFA show cattle deal, and did FFA leadership and district, and he chased his girlfriend up to Sam Houston State in Huntsville, and she was a barrel racer up there.

Anyway, we ended up both going through the ag program, ag business, and yeah, it was a great path to take.

I knew my now-wife since pre-K, so I grew up with her, and her dad was in the boot business, obviously. They've been doing it for 50-something years, and so I always was kind of around it and knew what they did, and we dated in high school and stuff. So I'm very familiar with the industry, and thanks be to God, God put me in the Western industry for good. Not where I expected I was gonna be, but boy, it sure is a perfect place for me.

ALIGN: Amen. That's the beauty of where God takes us.

VAUGHAN: Yeah, it's following His will, it brings peace, and exactly where thankfully I landed was exactly where I needed to be. And boy, that's what people always say. What do I love most about my job? And it's this industry that I get work in. I mean, mom-and-pop retailers all over the country. And for the most part, they're second, third generation. They're in small community, rural community areas that are super conservative, Christian background, morals, values, they stand up. You can't have a successful small business in a small community if you're not doing things the right way, because you're going to see those same people that you're selling to at church and at school and in the restaurants. And you've got to be doing things the right way. And thankfully, that's what a lot of our retailers build their business around.

ALIGN: Do you remember the first time you put on a pair of Anderson Bean boots?

VAUGHAN: Well, I actually had my first pair that my father-in-law gave me up here. They were actually some Rios Mercedes, and they didn't fit me very well because I didn't know what size I was wearing.

I worked at a sale barn in Huntsville, a cattle sale barn, all through college, and I was wearing Red Wings and who knows what other boots, and he finally gave me a pair of boots.

I felt pretty cool because I knew how expensive they were. I had never worn boots that fancy. But they were some old rejects out of the outlet store, and I've still got them up on my trophy wall.

ALIGN: So where does the name Anderson Bean come from?

VAUGHAN: In the mid-80s, my father-in-law, Trainer Evans, and his partner, Pat Moody, decided that they needed to build a boot that was a little bit more price-point-oriented but still domestically made. So they took the model of Rios Mercedes and just shortened up a few steps in the labor process and tried to streamline some of the options and made it a little bit more of a production-type boot.

My father-in-law, he's a fifth-generation West Texas feedlot cowboy. He said that the women who ran the ranch never got the praise and the credit they deserved. The ranching guys always used to go out and have the biggest dogs and kill the biggest deer and do all that, all the big cowboy stories. The women were at home raising them. He named it for his great-grandmother and his grandmother and his mother, Helen Anderson and Macie Bean.

And he just saw those women needed a little bit more credit and so named the boot company after them.

ALIGN: What makes Anderson Bean boots unique?

VAUGHAN: A lot of it starts with where we start. And that's really good relationships with our suppliers and that we try to treat our suppliers the way we want to be treated from our retailers. And that's being really loyal and paying well, giving them plenty of time to procure the materials and to do things the right way and just really build up relationships.

And so if you don't have good leather and good high-quality materials, the boots are not going to hold up, and so really building those relationships with the supplier, so that they know what our customers are putting the boots through to make sure that we have high-quality materials going into it. And that was one of the things that we started off with. We can build a cowboy boot in the United States ... made pretty much completely with materials to come in from other parts of the world, especially Mexico. [But] we decided that if we're going to build a boot in the U.S., we need to use U.S. suppliers.

We want to support the supply chain. A lot of the manufacturing moved out of the country, and it left a lot of our suppliers high and dry. And so we want to be really loyal to them. And thankfully they serve us really well.

So it starts off with the materials that we select, but then a lot of it is the construction, doing things the right way with a leather insole, a leather heel counter, and people go, “Well, what does that mean?”

It means that the boot molds to your foot. The more you wear it, the more it molds. Any time you get leather wet, the pores open up, and it just shapes around your foot. And then just using high-quality lining leather that rubs against your leg.

We use a latex water-based glue on a lot of the processes that breathes a lot better since it's water-based. A lot of other companies use a rubber cement that's cheaper and quicker. It creates a water barrier, a vapor barrier, so the boots get hotter.

In Texas and Oklahoma, in summertime, people go, ”My gosh, I'm going to wear a sandal, I'm going to the beach, it's so hot.”

Our customers kick it into full gear. I mean, that's when all of our team roping started up, all the high school finals, rodeos, and in fact, we've got the International Finals Youth Rodeo going on in Shawnee in a couple of weeks.

There's nothing better than a boot that you can take to the local cobbler, he can pull the sole off of them and knows how to rework them because they've got the guts in them. And so if you take decent care of a pair of leather boots, you can re-sole them four, five, six, seven times. And I mean, that boot, you may spend 350, 400 bucks on them, but 150 bucks every time you get a pretty much brand-new boot.

ALIGN: You often describe your boots as being useful. Like they're a tool. So what kind of beating can they take, and what does that mean for them to be a tool?

VAUGHAN: A lot of our core customer base is competitive horse show world, and so cutting horse, reining horse, reining cow horse, these are trainers. It'd be like if you were going to put Michael Jordan in a pair of cowhorses.

These guys are the top of their industry, and people pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to train their horses. It's kind of like when you go to the Kentucky Derby, you watch it on TV. The trainers or the top notch, well, they're just training other rich people's horses for the most part, right?

But those guys and all of their staff are on horseback every day, training four, five, 10, 15, 20 horses. And so they ride, they wash those horses down, they're in the stalls, they're in the pens, they're in the manure, they're in the urine, they're back up on horseback, and especially the cutting horse guys, because those guys, they just ride and ride and ride and ride.

We always say it's best to kind of rotate your boots, let the leather dry. But these guys don't rotate. It's day in, day out. They're wet, they're dry, they're wet, they're dry. They've got spurs on them.

And so if we can build a boot that can hold up to that kind of wear and tear of a guy who uses that boot — they've got to compete in them. They've got to train those horses whenever it is. The competition is on; they've got to go. And so that's when we say that's a tool to let that guy be successful.

But then you get the real West Texas feedlot cowboys and these guys up in Montana and Dakota that are riding horseback — if you get a heel fall off your boot and you're in the middle of mountain country, there is no way to fix that. And so that's a tool that you've got to use, and you're riding up and down mountains and hills and in and out of streams and stuff. And so it's a livelihood for a lot of our customers that need those boots to actually survive and work.

And so I guess that's kind of the framework — whether we can build a boot strong enough for those guys and it'll last good enough for any normal guys like me and you.

ALIGN: Absolutely. Boots are so important. They’re what you wear to a wedding. They're what you wear to a funeral. They're what you wear in any really important event or even to the grocery store.

VAUGHAN: I think that's one of the things that brings you credit, whenever those guys are wearing the boots and the rest of the guys go, “Man, if that guy is wearing them, then" — you know, the same way with Michael Jordan in the Nikes.

That falls all the way down to the kids in sixth grade that are in the junior high team. They want a pair of those too because the best guys wear them, and that kind of works the same way with our world. And the other thing is, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, Amarillo: There's a horse show event going on in those towns just about every weekend, and these guys come from all over the country, and if you've got enough money to be in this industry and you're flying in and bringing horse trailers and things, you're probably a pretty big wig in your community, and so whatever you take and see, hats and saddles and tack and boots from Fort Worth, Oklahoma, and Amarillo, and you go back to your community, everybody's watching you and seeing what you're wearing, seeing what you're coming back with, seeing what kind of saddle you've gotten, and so you create all these little disciples all over the country from these guys that are the big wigs in their community with the coolest, newest things, and hopefully the best quality as well.

ALIGN: So Anderson Bean boots also happen to look really good. What goes into that aspect of it?

VAUGHAN: We don't do any direct-to-consumer sales. So we drew a line in the sand that we are only going to support our retail partners that built this brand up. We've got about 10 sales reps that travel the country — in fact, we've got Dallas market going on right now at the World Trade Center in Dallas, and so retailers come and visit, and they see samples, they see swatches, and they design boots for their store.

What that gives our retailers is that they are the design team. Leather suppliers will come down, and guys that don't know us will go, “Well, where's your design team?”

I like picking out leathers, and my wife does a lot of stuff, but our retailers design them. So say you got Michael Kahn that has Dollar Western Wear in Lubbock, Texas. Sales rep Doc Watson will go out there and show him some different samples, and Michael says I've got a fresh batch of Red Raider kids, freshmen, coming in. He says I want a good black, smooth ostrich. I need a good price point for those kids, but I want a red top and I want white and black stitching with white side seam and trim, and those kids are gonna be dancing.

Well, he'll design it exactly for that customer and that price point. But when those freshman kids roll in and they go, “Wow. I'll check out those boots," and they go in the store and they go, "Let me go see if I can find them cheaper online.”

Guess what: He designed those things exactly for his store. So he gets to make a nice margin on it, which is what a retailer needs to be able to save, keep his doors open. And that kid gets something that's unique and different. And so what really drives the Anderson Bean creativity is always having something unique and different. And our suppliers know we pay good. They know we hit the market fast.

We don't have to go through all this research and development and testing and things. I mean, I'll see a new skin and — in fact, we had our suppliers from South Africa our ostrich suppliers here a few weeks ago, and they brought in a cool olive green ostrich leather. Well, guess what, I'm showing that to retailers the next week. We're getting orders on it, and we hit the market, and you start seeing what different colors and different finishes there are.

I don't want to say we're industry leaders because we're so smart or talented; it's just because we move fast and we listen. And that means listen to what our retailers are asking for. And we're not smart enough to figure out what's going to be hot in fall of 2027, the way all these fashion brands dictate kind of what's coming and what's new. But yeah, unique hides and skins are our name. I mean, we do carpincho, we do stingray, we do kangaroo, we do elephant, hippo. We do beaver tail. We do giraffe, zebra. I mean, a lot of exotics and everything.

ALIGN: I saw a shark.

VAUGHAN: Oh yeah, shark.

Broken Bow Country: Meet the 17-year-old behind a viral Western clothing brand



Bone dry

Broken Bow Country offers far more than high-quality apparel and prints with lonely skeleton cowboys. It comes with an honest-to-God ethos. Not, like most clothing brands, a “philosophy,” not in a stilted, corporate, phony way.

No, this is an ethos. Something that would drive a strong, silent outcast traversing the gasping heat of an endless desert.

"Until you're in front of people, until they know you have the credibility and the ethos, they're not going to care for the most part.”

The Broken Bow Country Instagram account features feverish videos full of rebellion and culture: outlaw culture.

I assumed that all of these creative lanes — clothing design, prints, video editing, and the adoration of music — were the outcome of a collaborative venture, a lean company of artistic-minded men with a heart for a bygone world.

So imagine my surprise upon discovering that Broken Bow Country is the handiwork of a17-year-old student at Columbine High School in Colorado. He took the SAT the day before our interview.

His name is Colton Patterson, an artist and country music fanatic, who sees his craft as a path to “actually being true and providing something that adds value to people's lives, that speaks to the stuff that they enjoy.”

When he first started the Broken Bow Instagram account last December, it was mainly to curate and share videos he liked. He quickly realized that his video edits appealed to hundreds of people.

Then it was thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Before long he had half a million followers.

“I couldn't believe it. I'm so grateful to have some place, something that I enjoy and love, and have it in front of that many people. I thank God for it. I've never seen them.”

He finds humility in this success. “I'd probably be doing stuff like this if I wasn't, like, getting any return from it at all. I'd still be drawing, and I'd still be looking at classic country stuff, so it's incredible that it's something that is, like, actually going down and that I can do for a job.”

I ask Colton what people at school think of his brand and his art.

“It's hard to get it across to most people. They think it's cool that it's big and it's out there. But for the most part, people don't care all that much about mostly super old grandpa country music and drawings. It stays on the lower key, but people recognize and see it. They appreciate it.”

Pop country sucks

Colton remembers road trips with his family when he was 6 or 7: “I'd be in the car, my dad would play him on the CD player we had in there, the movie screen. I'd watch 'The Searchers' and 'The Cowboys.' I loved John Wayne.”

His great-grandpa always had Westerns on: “All the John Wayne stuff, and I'd just be there and I can't understand what's going on, but you can see cowboys riding around, and I knew I liked it. It's always just stuck with me and the stuff I do.”

“I've always enjoyed country music,” Colton tells me, “and it's always been something that I've been connected through with my grandparents and my dad and everybody. And being an artist and liking to do that stuff, I just wanted to put it all out in one place where I could have the things that I liked or that I thought other people liked just in one location. I thought I'd be good at it, and it turns out that it's worked well, and I'm incredibly grateful. just be able to have it as like a collective or an archive of the stuff that I enjoy, and the classics that really don't get brought up that much.”

He loves George Jones, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings.

He listens to music while making his art so that he can achieve a “flow state,” the heightening of his creative output.

Marty Robbins' album "The Gunfighter," for instance, activates the flow state: “If that doesn't get you in the mood, nothing else will.”

He also likes “Ralph Stanley, a bluegrass musician from Kentucky." Colton continues:

He played with Keith Whitley, actually, if you know, he was the rhythm guitarist in his band forever, before he was famous. And they rolled around together, and he's one of the best bluegrass musicians of all time. He's incredible.You can make a lot of like Western gunslinger type things and also like very sad portraits and scenes and these types, and I think it just works really well for all the cowboy ethos and all the Western mystical cowboy that surrounds the whole genre of country music.

You look around, and like in anything else, in any other genre of music or type of thing or like culture that you look in, you don't find anything that's as pure and preaching good qualities and the type of, I'm just trying to think of the stories and the values that you actually get in country music. Because you're telling stories about people that have been through hard times or that are trying to find God, or a lot of it's God-related too. That's a big thing.

He pauses.

“Cowboys also,” he adds. “I just think cowboys are cool.”

I ask him if he was one of those kids who draws on everything.

“Yes, definitely. I've drawn forever. It's something my mom does, and it's something that I've gotten good at just doing over and over. It's really just something that I love and have always wanted to use as an actual outlet or something, the way that my business is doing it now. I'm incredibly grateful to just have it as the centerpiece of everything I do now.”

He’s not a fan of modern country. His most striking expression of this contempt is an image of Johnny Cash's skeleton making the same rude gesture he once made in life.

Playfully, the post’s location is set to San Quentin Prison.

“There's definitely good modern country music, but a lot of it is really just trash,” says Colton.

He’s hopeful that this will change.

He has a special ire for Morgan Wallen. “I trash him on the account. I feel bad for that, but it's, I don't like the way that it puts country music in, and it really doesn't do justice to a lot of it. George Jones is rolling in his grave.”

The Applebee’s song, for instance.

When I tell him I haven’t heard it, he’s genuinely relieved.

“All the values in country music that are worth it, the ones I was speaking about, the stuff that I actually resonated with, are completely lost in most of the stuff that comes out today,” he tells me:

Because it's really mostly just about getting drunk and doing whatever, all these party songs, like things you can just spread out and commercialized and put on the radio, and it's not things that are truly speaking to people's emotions and true stories and feelings that people have.

Because George Jones or any of these guys, Waylon Jennings, they make songs that are they started off as people that were just pawns of like commercial radio and all the big country stars that were wearing like rhinestone suits on stage

But then they actually shifted over to music that was speaking to true, like, gritty problems that people have, alcoholism and women leaving you, things like that, like stuff that you don't want to talk about if you're putting it out to mass radio platforms. And it's truly, it's been lost. It's just not there in new country.

I'm hoping that it doesn't stagnate or something doesn't happen, but really it's just my goal to keep going authentically, putting out the content and collecting the things that people like to see and enjoy and have lost in other parts where they're just not being shown. It's really just what I'm trying to stick to as time goes on.

Tradition

Along with remaining humble, Colton's concerned with maintaining authenticity.

“What I realized very early on is that like no one will care about it until you just put it in front of them and you've shown that you can add value to their life," Colton says. "Because I imagine I could have started with the drawings, I could have posted them as much as I wanted, but until you're in front of people, until they know you have the credibility and the ethos, they're not going to care for the most part.”

“But having the page and showing that, like, I can constantly find these things and create this collection of stuff that people enjoy watching and that I love — it creates a community and a group of people that you know, like, are familiar with your taste and things you like. It's all just about being actually genuine because you can't get anything across. People know when you're faking it and when you're just trying to move your way up or try to get a little leverage on them.”

“Things aren't looking the best,” Colton says. “But culturally, the values you're talking about, I think definitely because in the '70s, you saw people come out of the '60s and they had a conservative revival because you've seen like the peak, like the pendulum swung all the way this way and, like, people are doing crazy stuff. They're like, okay, we gotta come back down and get back to traditional values. And I think that's very much what's happening right now."

I tell him that I've seen it also in faith with his generation.

“Faith is definitely coming back a great deal. More people believe in God now than ever in the past recent years, at least. I see tons of people my age that believe in God and take it on more. Because people are realizing right now, they're understanding, like, we've gotten too far away. Like it's time to come back and reel in.”

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