AN ODE TO THE WEST

Cowboy poetry slams, new-gen yodelling and Basque bites feature in Nevada’s Elko, as Zoey Goto saddles up for the fun gold rush town’s annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering

- Zoey Goto

It’s barely sunrise, but I’m already warming up my voice for a yodelling session with Kristyn Harris – a young buck reviving this time-honoured cowboy singing tradition. “Louder! It’s impossible to yodel quietly,” she urges, a 10-gallon hat crowning her cascade of curly blonde hair.

As Kristyn effortlessly slides into falsetto, I do my best to follow suit – “yodel-ay-ee-oooo” – while beyond the window the sun spills its first light over Elko’s Ruby Mountain Range, casting a golden hue like something straight out of the 1969 movie Once Upon a Time in the West. The 30-year-old western swing star is here to perform at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of frontier arts now marking its 40th year – the same event that has drawn me to this remote pocket of northeastern Nevada, 420 miles from the bright lights and hungry slots of Las Vegas.

Unlike me, this isn’t Kristyn’s first rodeo. “I first came to the Gathering 13 years ago, so I kind of grew up on stage here,” she tells me, guitar slung casually across her shoulder. “Elko started the whole contemporary cowboy poetry movement. Some people still struggle to connect the tough life of ranch work with the artistry of poetry. But cowboys have always had to entertain themselves on long, lonesome cattle drives, so this tradition runs deep.”

Each January, around 8,000 people descend upon Elko for its week-long National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a folksy celebration of poetry, crafts, music and storytelling rooted in the rural American West. Events spill across a constellation of venues in this gold-mining town of 20,000. I leave Kristyn to prep for her next set and slip into a ringside seat at the conference centre, just in time for the cowboy poetry open mic.