The cowboys Hollywood forgot
The cowboy of the movies was almost always white. The cowboy of history often wasn't. After the Civil War, Texas cattle had to be driven north to the railheads in Kansas, and the men who worked those drives were a mix of white, Mexican and Black riders. Many of the Black cowboys had learned to work cattle on Texas ranches, some of them as enslaved people before emancipation.
They roped, rode, broke horses and drove herds across hundreds of miles of open country. Yet by the time Hollywood turned the West into a genre, they had been written out of the picture almost entirely.
Legends of the Black West
A few names survived, and their stories are as dramatic as anything on screen.
Nat Love
Cowboy · "Deadwood Dick"
Born enslaved in Tennessee, he went west as a teenager, became a celebrated trail hand and published his own autobiography in 1907.
Bass Reeves
Deputy U.S. Marshal
A formerly enslaved man who became one of the most effective lawmen in Indian Territory. Some historians argue he inspired the Lone Ranger.
Bill Pickett
Rodeo star
The cowboy credited with inventing "bulldogging," the event now known as steer wrestling, and a headliner of the Wild West shows.
Mary Fields
"Stagecoach Mary"
Known as the first African American woman to carry the U.S. mail on a star route, driving a stagecoach through Montana in the 1890s.
The Buffalo Soldiers
U.S. Army, 1866 onward
The all-Black cavalry and infantry regiments that served across the western frontier, later immortalized in song by Bob Marley.
Jamaica's Wild West
The western had a second life in the Caribbean. In 1960s and '70s Jamaica, cowboy films, and especially Italian spaghetti westerns, packed the cinemas, and the music followed. The Upsetters scored a UK hit in 1969 with "Return of Django." Deejays took the names Clint Eastwood and Josey Wales. The Harder They Come cast its outlaw hero as a gunslinger, and Bob Marley sang "I Shot the Sheriff" and "Buffalo Soldier."
Reggae and the West were already riding together. Nobody had yet built a whole band around it.
1993: the Reggae Cowboys saddle up
The Reggae Cowboys formed in Toronto in 1993 with a specific mission: to celebrate the little-known history of Black cowboys in the American West. Their name, their songs and their look, in full Wild West garb, all came from that history. Guitarist Bird Bellony brought the twang of country and spaghetti-western guitar to roots reggae's one-drop rhythm.
The press noticed. Billboard called the band's work "a proud, hip, authoritative record loaded with plenty of crossover firepower" and predicted the band would spark "heritage-minded resurrections of the wild west reggae of the late '60s and early '70s." The band wrote the title track for the PBS series Imaging America episode on the Buffalo Soldiers, headlined the Kennedy Center, played Red Rocks and toured with The Wailers.
"The band was founded in Toronto in 1993. Their name came from their fascination with the little-known role of African-Americans in western history."Reggae Cowboys press kit, 2004
The culture catches up
Three decades later, Black cowboy culture moved to the center of popular music. In 2019, Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" spent a record 19 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2024, Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter reclaimed country music's Black roots, and Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" matched that 19-week record. The "yeehaw agenda" became a movement, and a new generation started asking where the Black cowboy had been all this time.
The Reggae Cowboys were asking that question, and answering it in song, in 1995. Their five albums, from Tell the Truth to Pony Xpress, are still streaming today.