Welcome to our newly renovated website. Thanks to everyone who worked on its construction and to the funders who supported the work, we are better able to serve you, our members and supporters. We hope you like the results.
You’ll find the site more intuitive - everything within a click or two away. One of the goals of this renovation is to make communication easier and more concise. You should be able to find what you’re looking for within a pull-down menu if not directly with a button on the cover page. A work in progress, we welcome your comments and recommendations for ongoing improvement.
One facet of our mission is to provide opportunities to tell the real stories of the contemporary rural West. Our National Cowboy Poetry Gathering delivers that opportunity in a big way in real time every winter (January 30 – February 4, 2017). We hope that our website becomes the digital home for continuing the storytelling and poetry and ranchland culture-sharing that happens at the Gathering through conversations on our blog. Our large inventory of YouTube videos and Deep West media projects, both audio and video, carry on the storytelling tradition. You can access these stories and performances with links here.
The Western Folklife Center has been “gathering” these stories, songs, poems and topical panel discussions from its beginning. Since 1985 and the first Gathering in Elko, Nevada, showcasing ranch culture in the present tense--as told by the cowboys, ranchers, and diverse ethnic agrarian communities of the West (and the world)--has become the driving vision and modus operandus for the organization. A community was launched back then, first by cowboy poets once unaware of others like themselves with rhymes in their hip pockets, ranchers and townsfolk, and then tourists arriving along el Camino I-80. And that community continues to grow and diversify to this day just as the West grows and diversifies. We’ve become a bridge for those steeped in deep Western traditions and those drawn to the West for a thousand different reasons. With our knowledge of traditional folkways, we beam a light and lend an ear to the sights and sounds of the changing landscape of ranch culture. We become creative placekeepers.
We hope this website helps spread the word and keeps the faith in rural values that we share in common. Thank you.
David Roche
Executive Director
