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Show Ray Lashley Syracuse, Utah born: 1 August, 1923 Like many reciters of cowboy poetry, Ray Lashley learned most of his poems from printed sources. As a young boy, growing up on a farm in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, he was a voracious reader of western-pulp magazines, memorizing the cowboy poems they contained and reciting them to friends or family. At the age of eighteen, he left Missouri to serve in the Navy during World War II and his subsequent employment in the defense industry as a weapons testing specialist and instrumentation engineer, led him to Utah in 1964. Ray has been interested in cattle culture throughout his life and for the last sixteen years has devoted his time to raising horses on his northern Utah farm near the shores of the Great Salt Lake. He is a farrier, an inventor, and is well acquainted with the work and language of cattle ranching. Like many other reciters, the usual settings for his recitations are drinking establishments and male-oriented activities such as hunting and fishing trips. Ray is a talented and knowledgeable performer of cowboy poetry, much of which is in oral circulation in both Nevada and Idaho. He counts "Clay Allison and the Kid" and Curley Fletcher's 1931 poem, "The Ridge Runnin' Roan," among his favorite cowboy poems. Cowboy Poetry From Utah 67 |