Colorado Morton at No Depression
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The latest Roots in the Archive column is about "Colorado Morton's Ride" (sometimes known as "Colorado Morton's Last Ride"), a poem written by a Pulitzer Prize winner and a Montana cowboy, and recited at a migrant worker camp in 1941, where it was recorded by Library of Congress folklorists Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin. We first told the story here on the blog back in 2014. More recently, we featured it on the Folklife Today podcast. In doing the podcast research I turned up a few more facts about the cowboy author Rivers Browne, so the story over at No Depression has a couple more details than the previous written version. So if you're curious how a Pulitzer Prize winner from Rhode Island met up with a Buckaroo from Montana (who happened to have been born in India as the son of a British Army General), and if you wonder how the poem and its reciter were connected to the great photographer Dorothea Lange and the novelist John Steinbeck, it's time to surf on over to this link at No Depression!
Posted in: No Depression's Roots in the Archive, Poetry