Once seen as ruffians and pushed to the outskirts of Victorian society, cowboys were reinvented as rugged cultural heroes in the American consciousness in the early 20th century through dime novels, rodeos, movies, and more. Cowboys became an amalgamation of American rural identity; it didn’t matter if you were an Appalachian coal miner or a logger in the Pacific Northwest, you could be a cowboy.
Cowboys also soon became associated with country music. Between the 1930s and 1950s, the use of cowboy hats and boots crafted the image of a more honky-tonk country artist who replaced the overall-wearing Appalachian “hillbilly” as the genre’s icon. At the same time as white southerners adopted the white cowboy as the symbol of country music, they increasingly shunted aside Black musicians, who previously had participated in the shared working-class genre, forcing them into a separate category: the blues.
Segregation also started to affect the Black Americans who had actively participated in the popularization of “the cowboy” and the crafting of country-western culture, with rodeo and Wild West show performances by famed Black rodeoer Bill Pickett in the early 20th century and movies like Herb Jeffies’s Harlem on the Prairie (1937). Increasingly, they had to perform with care — and in many states, in separate spaces, after officials began enforcing Jim Crow laws in public places, including musical performances, movie showings, and rodeos.
With the entrenchment of segregation laws and the reemergence of the KKK, rodeo producers and local discrimination laws forced Pickett and other Black rodeo stars to pose as Indigenous or Hispanic in places like Texas. And as white cowboys organized unions in the 1930s (eventually becoming the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association), women of all races and men of color were effectively pushed out of the highest earning rodeos around the country. In the mid-20th century, Texas’s highly exploitative prison rodeo—held at the state prison in Huntsville every Sunday in October from 1931 until 1986—was one of the few places an American could watch Black and white men perform as cowboys side-by-side.
Responding to their exclusion from country music and rodeo, Indigenous and Black communities created vibrant rodeo and music circuits of their own that allowed them to perform safely. By the 1940s and '50s, San Antonio held numerous Black rodeos and local riders participated in the Southwestern Colored Rodeo Association, which organized a circuit of Black rodeos in central Texas, while other Texas communities incorporated Black rodeos into Juneteenth celebrations.
Yet, despite their perseverance, Cold War American popular culture featured two paradigmatic cowboys: John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. Neither had been actual range hands or even hailed from the regional West or South. But the two men — whether they were in films or engaged in politics— embodied a white, hypermasculine, taciturn, and violent ethos that defined Americans’ image of the cowboy, which became ubiquitous in popular culture.
