Michael Allen

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Michael Allen | "I Just Want to be a Cosmic Cowboy": Hippies, Cowboy Code, and the Culture of a Counterculture | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3 | The History Cooperative

"I Just Want to be a Cosmic Cowboy": Hippies, Cowboy Code, and the Culture of a Counterculture

"Cowboys" and "Hippies" are not as different as one might think. This article explores the connections between cowboys and hippies portrayed by 1960s and 1970s countercultural musicians, moviemakers, and novelists who stressed themes of the Myth of the West and the Cowboy Code. These portrayals of "Cosmic Cowboys" show that many scholars' generalizations about the "radical" and "leftist" nature of the 1960s "counterculture" break down under close inspection.

We're just a couple of free spirits driftin' across the land.
Chris LeDoux, "The Cowboy and the Hippie"

Figure 1. Concert Poster. New Riders of the Purple Sage, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, and Pure Prairie League formed the triple bill of this 1975 University of Montana (Missoula) country rock concert. From the private collection of Michael Allen.

IN A COUNTRY SONG about rodeo, "The Cowboy and the Hippie," the singer tells an autobiographical tale about the relationship between cowboy culture and counterculture. It is true, the singer notes, that most rodeo folks believe that "cowboys and hippies ain't never got along," but he relates an experience that changed his mind on that count. "Down on his luck" on a lonely desert highway, the rodeo cowboy finds himself hitchhiking alongside a hippie, a groovy, long-haired sixties vagabond. The cowboy is initially repulsed by this "long-haired freak." He does not hesitate to comment on his "stinking" aroma, adding "Boy, you're a disgrace to the human race." But the hippie counters with some jibes of his own concerning "the green stuff" on the cowboy's boots and jeans—"it's enough to make a buzzard belch!" Then, refusing to fight, the hippie voices what amounts to a soliloquy celebrating the free, wandering lifestyle that the two enjoy:

You know, man, in a lot of ways we're an awful lot alike,
once you get down beneath the skin.
Like two books with different covers but the same words inside,
we're both brothers of the wind.
Now we both love our freedom and we'll answer to no man,
and you've heard it said, "to thine ownself be true."
We're just a couple of free spirits driftin' across the land.
Doin' exactly what we wanta do.

"I don't see why we can't get along," the hippie observes, and the rodeo cowboy finds himself shaking hands, drawn to the hippie's down-home philosophy. Although they soon leave the desert and go their separate ways, the cowboy has come to understand in a broader sense the Cowboy Code to which all rodeo cowboys subscribe: "[T]he closest thing to freedom is livin' on the road/in a country where freedom's almost gone."¹

The author of "The Cowboy and the Hippie" was the late Chris LeDoux, former World Champion Bareback Bronc Rider and North America's foremost rodeo song composer and singer. Although Chris LeDoux was no hippie, he nevertheless matured and attended college in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Vietnam War. LeDoux's generation of rodeo cowboys was called the "New Breed" by its peers because they wore their hair long and sported sideburns.² As evidenced by "The Cowboy and the Hippie," the 1960s counterculture influenced LeDoux's artistic imagination.

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