Baxter Black

  BAXTER BLACK - A great entertainer (he happened to be a cowboy poet) recently passed away. I saw Baxter Black perform one time and can’t remember laughing so hard. He had a way of stringing words together in comic fashion to tell his poem-stories that I’ve not heard anyone else do. Much of his verse was committed to memory and he could stand on stage and recite for a long time.

     Being able to commit long passages of material to memory seems to me an asset. I’ve not been able to do it. My wife, the special ed teacher, hints at a possible learning disability where I probably should have been her student. My history books tell of how Winston Churchill could recite long passages of rather obscure works to fit some situation he found himself in. 

     I have a set of books by Daniel J. Boorstin, one of which is The Discoverers, in which he wrote a chapter called “The Lost Arts of Memory.” He writes of the days before books appeared when Memory ruled daily life. It was Memory that carried knowledge forward through time and space. For instance, great works of literature such as The Iliad and The Odyssey survived as Memory works. Then the printed book became the warehouse of Memory, and the attitude developed that knowledge doesn’t need to be memorized since it can now be looked up. That’s where I fit in with my lazy brain.

     Our Native American friends still preserve and maintain some of their memory power with  ideas of oral tradition. It’s only been a couple hundred years that their history and culture has been preserved through the written word. But it I believe knowledge of their life was known far in advance of the written word.

     Back to Baxter Black. It readers of this are unfamiliar with his work, type his name in the YouTube search blank and dozens of examples will come up.