Price: Please call
Size: 6h x 5w x 4d in inches
Medium: Patinaed bronze
Numbered Edition: 40
Artist Models: 4

An excerpt from the Harry Jackson book where Harry Jackson speaks about this sculpture.
The whole history of the cowboy lives through his songs.  There is a lot of written history about people that went up the trail, that worked ranches, that bought and sold cattle, that punched cows, from Mexico to Canada and out in California, but the whole story from begining to end, if one listens intently, is recorded and very much alive in his songs.  There isn’t anything I think I’ve done about cowboys that doesn’t in some way come directlyfrom his own songs.  The only things I haven’t dealt with are shoot-outs on Main Street and drunken brawling, just because I haven’t gotten around to it, and besides it really isn’t a very major part of the cowboy despite what Hollywood and TV has to say.  Cowboys are horsemen who handle cattle in the open.  But there is nothing prosaic about a cowboy’s life.  Schoolhouse reasoning is not enough to do his job.  It’s more complex, like writing a piece of music, with a sense of dangerous style that would boggle the minds of most ordinary composers.  The real style of a cowboy, the poetry of the way he sits his horse and the way they become one, loping down a hillside or over a cutbank or through a wash in the rain or sometimes in the dark or through brush and around trees, the way he calculates the landscape, paces and rates his animal, makes his rope work – that has endless rhythm and timing.  If there is no rhythm, and if the line of the whole flow is not lyrical, it is somehow not cowboy and it won’t work.  So when a cowboy pics up a guitar and starts to sing, or plays a mouth organ, that’s just when the song becomes overt, but the rest of his life is always song, one continuous song.

Jackson’s first sculpture directly related to music was Long Ballad, a small seated figure of a cowboy singing and playing the guitar, done in conjunction with the Folkways album in 1959.  In 1960 he began a series of dancing and singing figures in bronze that included Mexican Death dancer , Mexican Dancers in a Glade, Sor Capanna, Mexican Piper, and Mexican Dancer.