“Mammas,” Ed Bruce famously sang, “don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”
It’s a song that makes a point of breaking down the challenging, lonely, alienating aspects of being a cowboy without ever acknowledging that not every baby grows up believing that becoming a cowboy is even an option.
High Horse: The Black Cowboy
The Bottom Line
Smart and entertaining, if lacking some depth.
Airdate: Thursday, November 20 (Peacock)
Director: Jason Perez
“You can’t be,” Marian Wright Edelman is credited with saying, “what you don’t see.”
The erasure of the Black cowboy from the American mythos sounds frivolous until you give it a second’s thought and realize that if cowboys are integral to the American mythos and Black cowboys have been erased from that cultural tapestry, it’s tantamount to nothing less than erasing the Black experience from the American experience.
This quick and easy journey from micro to macro, from seemingly inconsequential to objectively integral, is at the heart of Peacock‘s new docuseries, High Horse: The Black Cowboy. Directed by Jason Perez and featuring Jordan Peele among its producers and talking heads, High Horse makes a smart argument in easily digestible form, though at three episodes of barely over 40 minutes apiece, it could stand to be significantly more rigorous.
The opening installment of High Horse is the one that directly addresses the title, going back to the racially inflected origins of the word “cowboy” and pondering how people who used to be synonymous with the term were pushed aside by popular culture in favor of the John Wayne/Marlboro Man version.
This is easily the most fun chapter of the series, both in terms of subject matter — lots of talk about the Lone Ranger as well as a hilarious deconstruction of Lethal Weapon as a Western, letting Peele use the phrase “racist-ass Melly Gibson” — and formal elements, with lots of well-shot re-enactments featuring Black cowboys. The episode introduces many of the diverse talking heads who will be featured throughout, a group that includes journalists, academics, Peele, a wide assortment of contemporary cowboys and cowboy-adjacents, and Beyoncé’s mum.
The episode has some awareness that in this particular piece of the conversation, High Horse is a few years behind. For the full episode, it’s one expert after another mentioning a key figure lost to history and then accompanying it with a very mainstream, very recent depiction of said figure, clearly not lost to history anymore.
Like, “Did you know that the Lone Ranger was based on a Black U.S. Marshal?” Cut to footage from Lawmen: Bass Reeves, from not-obscure executive producer Taylor Sheridan. Multiple figures we’ve supposedly never heard of before are discussed along with footage from Jeymes Samuel’s Netflix film The Harder They Fall and, with Peele leading the way, Nope, streaming now on Peacock. It isn’t that there’s no value in telling the story of the Compton Cowboys, but if you do so while acknowledging that there have been multiple documentaries about the Compton Cowboys, you’re not necessarily making a case for the urgency of your intellectual project.
The episode is fairly scattershot, telling 25 or 30 stories in superficial terms, when telling four or five with real depth — perhaps the four or five that haven’t been addressed in major motion pictures — might have been better. Those focal stories might have involved famous people — Pam Grier and Glynn Turman discussing the Stagecoach Mary movie they tried to make is gold — or casting light on lesser-known figures like 16-year-old barrel racing rodeo champion Paris Wilburd, who is a TV docuseries star waiting to happen.
High Horse uses the erasure (and slow restoration) of the Black cowboy in the cultural narrative as a set-up for a second episode that’s far more pointed and responds directly to anybody who might be tempted to think that, as a concern, this is just a trifle.
Titled “Land,” the episode pivots smoothly from Manifest Destiny and general westward expansion, showing how Blacks were moved not only out of the iconography of the West but out of the literal space. The recently well-chronicled Tulsa Massacre is referenced, but also what happened in less-known offshoots of Black Wall Street like Boley, Oklahoma. These historical examples parallel modern struggles like that of John Boyd Jr. and the National Black Farmers Association, as well as the stories of the Mallerys, Colorado ranchers whose situation is far more interesting and harrowing than the documentary has time to get into.
The third episode shifts its focus to what one talking head calls the “Take-Back Era,” the reclaiming of formerly Black (or at least diverse) spaces, using country music and a race horse named Black Lives Matter as key illustrations — with the warning that progress is sometimes temporary and any terrain that’s recovered can, without vigilance, be taken away again. If nothing else, it will give you a reason to be pissed off again at the people who tried claiming Cowboy Carter was artistic tourism.
It’s less that the history depicted here has been “largely untold,” as Peacock press releases claim, and more that the connections made in the documentary haven’t been conveyed in this sort of easily digestible way.
The three-part documentary makes a full-circle argument that I appreciated, given my general conviction that most three-part documentaries should — stop me if I’ve said this before — either have been a more tightly edited feature or a better produced/researched six-to-eight part docuseries. Even if High Horse: The Black Cowboy falls into the second category, the cogency of the argument keeps it from feeling like a missed opportunity.
There are simply more stories to tell within this world, and some of the stories featured here could be told better, but if High Horse: The Black Cowboy just ends up being a conversation starter or a gateway to further investigation, that’s worthwhile. Especially if it lets everybody know that it’s their choice whether or not they decide to grow up to be cowboys.
