Bernie Taupin, Oscar winner, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and long-time song-writing collaborator with Elton John, has contributed an exceptional foreword.
"There's an honesty and integrity in these images that parlays all the elements of what it means to exist outside the boundaries of conformity and confinement. The rebel spirit, the rugged individualism, and the absolute unapologetic rhythm of history. This is stunning work--a true testament to the men and women who are the anvil on which America's backbone was forged." --Bernie Taupin
Gretel Ehrlich, best-selling and award-winning writer, poet, and essayist, has penned a fitting essay.
"So much has been made of the vanishing West, of "the last cowboy," of the museum-like vision of men and women who ride the range. They are often enshrined in movies and television series as if ranches had ceased to exist and cowboys and cowgirls had gone home to work in town. The opposite is true. In the long stretch of the Americas, from the tip of Argentina to the extreme north of Canada, and all through the United States, working cattle and sheep ranches continue on." --Gretel Ehrlich
Michael R. Grauer, known as 'Cowboy Mike', is the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture and Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art at The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and one of the most knowledgeable cowboy historians in the world.
"Today, thousands of rodeos of all kinds occur across the Americas. Yet the foundation of rodeo remains grounded in the work of cowboys, vaqueros, gauchos, drovers, and cowhands from the sixteenth century onward, and of the human on horseback symbolizing freedom and liberty. Cowboys of the Americas, from Canada to Argentina, still do their jobs every day, without fail and without thinking twice." --Michael Grauer