I’ve gone down the spelunking rabbit hole of western Americana, drover (aka, cowboy) folk music and culture, and have in front of me Glenn Ohrlin The Hell-Bound Train: A Cowboy Songbook (University of Illinois Press, 1973). The foreword is by Archie Green, and he gives a couple touch points of Glenn’s seasons of life. Born in Minneapolis on October 26, 1926, Glenn’s dad was a Swedish immigrant who worked farm labor in the rural, and transitioned to house painting in the growing metropole of Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Glenn’s mother was second generation Norwegian Minnesotan. So Glenn’s birthday comes two years after Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres is published in 1924, and he (Glenn) represents the transition of 2nd to 3rd wave cowpoke western Americana.

Without going too far into the rest, here are some surviving material culture (aka, “STUFF”) nodes of this all.

First. Within this 1973 U of Illinois Press monograph is a super thin record (33 1/3 RPMs) with just a couple of Glenn Ohrlin’s songs on it. We have a record player. So may try to play this. But this is the second record I’ve seen now in these U of Illinois Press publications on western Americana drover life from the 1970s. Good stuff.

Second. Shadd Piehl, a couple weeks ago, mentioned that he knew Glenn Ohrlin, and Glenn on occasion would visit his family place (Walter and Becky Piehl’s) around Minot and Velva, North Dakota. Because Glenn’s sister had some kind of connection with the Minot and Velva area. So that transitioned into Shadd telling me he, at his house, has some of Glenn’s horse tack hanging on a wall. My eyebrows raised at that and I asked Shadd if he would mind sending me a picture of the horse tack. Relics and history is only alive if we talk about it in the present, no? So below is a photo of said horse tack of Glenn Ohrlin’s. Perhaps we’ll look to curate it indefinitely in a Northern Plains west-Missouri River cowboy bar.