About S. Omar Barker
and his book
SONGS OF THE SADDLEMEN
“Songs of the Saddlemen” corrals a selection of the best of S. Omar Barker’s buckaroo balladry, as salty as horse sweat, and as entertaining and readable as any fiction. In these poems the author gives you rangeland color and tang, history and heroism, character and corral dust, with many a yarn told in rib-tickling rhyme—all in the true tradition of cowboy courage and hardihood.
“Jack Potter’s Courtin’ ” is alone worth the price of the book, and the poems about Judge Roy Bean are already much quoted classics of Southwestern folklore. “Code of the Cow Country” hangs framed on the walls of dozens of Southwest ranch houses—testimony to the popularity of his poems among the cowfolks of whom Barker writes with humor and understanding. Some of Barker’s poems appear in a score of textbooks of American literature—testimony to the authentic quality of his contribution to a great American tradition.
But the main earmark of “Songs of the Saddlemen” is that you will find them big fun to read. You might even get a hanker to recite or sing some of them, for they are that kind of poems.
Published by The Swallow Press, 2679 South York Street, Denver 10, Colorado, at $2.75. Mr. Alan Swallow is the publisher.
S. Omar Barker is a traditional old-school westerner, whose magic with words has earned for him high rank among the literary greats of America. Notable among his literary contributions have been published material in the Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post and the Saturday Review of Literature. From this editor’s viewpoint, the greatest of all his writings he will leave for posterity has been preserved for all time in a book properly entitled “Songs of the Saddlemen.” For once, here is an author that captures the true spirit of the cow country west; his salty tang together with cowboy expressions are straight from the rangeland. The S. Omar Barker “shorts” which we have published in this issue are but a mere sampling of some of his shorter pieces which appear in his book, “Songs of the Saddlemen.”
—Jim Drape in The Horse Lover’s Magazine October-November 1959 issue