In 1994, a film came out with Houston, brothers, a great love, death, and one of the era’s most searing soundtracks—but not a single cowboy. Jason’s Lyric (Jason's Lyric) was shot right in Houston’s Third and Fourth Wards: the This Is It Soul Food diner on Blodgett, the liquor store on the corner of McGowen, the bar run by “Gangster,” played by Forest Whitaker, a picnic at an abandoned bus station with the downtown sunset behind it. A rare thing for Black cinema of those years: instead of an invented Los Angeles, real Texas, location shooting, street for street. That is why Houstonians still know it by heart as their film.
And here is the strange part. Texas means cowboys. A state where there is a hat hanging from every porch and rodeo is baked into the school calendar. But in the best-known Houston film about Black life, there is no cowboy at all. As if someone cut him out of the frame. Spoiler: they did. Not out of the film—from history. And the city where Jason’s Lyric was shot is the very place where that cowboy was never cut out of anything: he was there too, riding, all along. Every February, he still rides out onto Houston’s streets—they are literally closed for the parade of Black riders ahead of the biggest rodeo on the planet. This is the story of a trade that belonged to everyone—and of how its screen version came to belong to just one group.
Let’s begin with simple arithmetic.
When the Civil War ended, the Southern economy was face-down in the dirt, but the cattle had not gone anywhere. Texas herds had multiplied through the years of chaos, and there was no one around to eat them: demand lay northward, waiting by the railroads. Between “here” and the train station stretched hundreds of miles of open prairie, and for some twenty years an entire industry sprang up along those trails: dust, rivers, crossings, crews of ten or twelve armed men, and a cook with cast iron on a wagon. Who worked in those crews?
If you believe Westerns—guys with John Wayne’s face. If you believe the numbers—it gets more interesting. Back in 1969, historian Kenneth Porter combed through memoirs, newspapers, and drovers’ payroll records and arrived at a figure now repeated by museums: roughly every fourth cowboy of the great cattle-drive era was Black. The National Park Service says the same thing in a teaching guide, without rounding: one in four. Benny McRae, a Houston historian, estimated that between 5 and 8 thousand Black drovers passed along Texas trails between 1866 and 1900. A JSTOR article on rodeo works with “up to 6,000” at the peak of the cattle-drive era. The figures wander within the limits of what the genre can measure, but the scale is the same: a quarter of the industry—and a face that did not exist in film.
Why was it this way? The mechanics were simple, and nearly cynical for that reason. Work in the saddle was filthy, dangerous, and paid about what mining did—minus the dust in your lungs. For a former slave, though, it was one of the few paths to wages, mobility, and a skill no one could take away: a saddle did not ask who your father was. On ranches, as the Texas State Historical Association notes, Black hands were treated as workers, with less prejudice than in town: the cattle did not care, and for the most part neither did the owner. There were stories that went well beyond “for the most part”: Bose Ikard, the right-hand man of cattleman Charles Goodnight on his famous trail to New Mexico, drove the herd, bailed his boss out at relay stations, kept thousands of dollars in cash on him—a walking bank on hooves. Goodnight trusted Ikard as he trusted no one else: the TSHA and the National Park Service describe his role in one line—“the rancher’s chief detective and banker” on the trail.
And the word “cowboy” itself has a dark origin, and it is the finest illustration of the whole subject. In prewar Texas, white laborers were called cowhands, “hands with cattle.” But “boy”—a kid—was the word the white South used for an adult Black man, preferring not to acknowledge the adult in him. “Cow boy” initially sounded exactly like that: a derogatory name for a slave working cattle. Half a century later, the word had been repainted into a romantic white image, while its original bearers were left outside the frame. A word of humiliation became the costume of a myth—and landed on somebody else.
But all that is “somewhere back there, in the 19th century.” Now for the road straight into the film.
Houston’s livestock show was born in 1932, and around 2,000 spectators gathered for its first outing. By the 1950s it was already a serious machine, and in 1952 it acquired the signature feature that became its trademark: the Salt Grass Trail Ride—a caravan of cowboys that rides into the city a week before the show, and the city closes its streets for it. It was conceived and led by Reese Lockett, mayor of the town of Brenham. The city literally shuts down streets for a parade of living horses through the concrete—and photographs of that procession fly around the country every year.
In 1957, Jamie Francis walked into Lockett’s office—a Southwestern Bell master electrician, father of four, a man raised on horseback: his father had been a cowboy, and he wanted to pass that on to his sons. Francis asked for an application to ride with Salt Grass. Lockett understood the assignment in his own way: his questions became one long audition in patience, from “how do I know you won’t steal my horses?” to something unprintable about a Black rider and his boots. Francis eventually got the form—along with an innocent little “think about whether this is in your interest.” No interpreter was needed: if you go, you don’t go.
The next day, Francis returned the application to Lockett—blank. In protest. It was no longer a request. It was an announcement: we will make our own.
And Francis had a technically flawless calculation behind him, worth quoting verbatim. How do you stage a parade without white associations’ money? “Pretend you’re rich,” he explained later. Wealthy riders can drink whiskey all week—poor ones economize: “If a cowboy eats cornbread and beans all year, he can put aside a handful from every meal—and food on the trail will cost zero. Horses can eat cornbread too, by the way.” Add status management: “A rider is a rider. Left foot on the left, right foot on the right, head in the middle—and nobody can tell whether you’re rich or poor.” A financial model built on skipped meals and a poker face.
On a one-cent postcard, he sent a letter to Dr. E. B. Evans, president of Prairie View A&M—a historically Black agricultural college outside Houston. Three goals, written in an electrician’s hand: to immortalize the Buffalo Soldiers—Black cavalrymen of the Wild West; to bring Black youth back into agricultural and rodeo trades; to give graduates of Black agricultural colleges a way into the profession. Evans summoned him to campus. Evans, a wise man, began with an honest question: “I know Lockett. I know they drink and raise hell there.” Francis replied that his trail rode for the saddle, not the whiskey. “If that’s so—I’m with you one hundred percent.” The ride was named for the college: Prairie View Trail Ride.
In 1958, seven people set out on the trail: Francis, six companions, two mules borrowed from his father-in-law, and a wagon covered with canvas. 96 miles. One night, the cold hit so hard they took down the canvas and slept beneath it as a whole crew. And on Sabine Street, where the trails merged into the parade, there came the moment that makes this story worth remembering. The marshal called the Black seven into line—and a cowboy from the trail behind them charged into the gap, screaming: “I’d rather die in hell than let this n****r go ahead of me!” (a racist slur in the original; paraphrased). The horses behind him reared up like dominoes. A seventeen-year-old girl on a red-and-white horse could not hold on and struck her head on the asphalt—according to Francis, she died later. The integration of Houston’s parade came at a terrible price—Francis told the story half a century later, and memory had preserved every detail. But that ride onto Sabine Street did what it had to do: for the first time since the great drives of the 1860s, Texas trails were shared again.
The parade integrated step by step. In 1959, Francis had twice as many riders; the years passed, the numbers grew, the flare-ups subsided. In 1965, the Texas attorney general commissioned a survey: why were there so many horses within city limits, and what did citizens do with them? The standard answer from young people: “to ride in the Prairie View Trail Ride.” In 1967, the rodeo moved the parade’s gathering point to Memorial Park—and a ghost surfaced: a city ordinance barring Black people from gathering in parks, written after the 1917 riot. The National Guard was assigned to the trail ride. There was no bloodshed: the riders were asked to make camp, “like everyone else.” Francis led his trail ride for decades; in 1993—35 years after that Sabine Street moment—the rodeo finally established a committee for African American interests. By 2012, there were already around 1,500 Black riders in Houston’s parade each year. Several more associations grew from Francis’s trail ride—and Prairie View remains the oldest; today it sets out from Hempstead, 87 miles in the saddle over a week, with overnight stays in church halls outside Houston and zydeco dances until they drop.
By the way, the numbers in one breath: 2,000 spectators—1932; 2+ million—today. 96 miles—1958; 87—now. Seven—1958; fifteen hundred—2012. Growth any startup would envy.
One thing remains to be understood: where had all these people gone from the screen in 1994, when Jason’s Lyric was filmed? How did every fourth real cowboy leave not even a tenth of an image behind in cinema?
The answer is simple and ugly: film did not “lose” the Black cowboy—it appropriated him and stamped him white.
The mechanics are insultingly straightforward. Black cowboy Bill Pickett—the son of slaves from Travis, Texan to the marrow—devised and turned bulldogging into a national event: bringing down a steer by grabbing its horns and twisting its lip, a move he picked up from a herding dog that handled bulls that way. The sensation of Cheyenne Frontier Days in 1904, star of the 101 Ranch Wild West show, touring from Canada to England, early film roles—the first Black cowboy, a screen star. Now watch the hands: the fame of the early Western was harvested by his contemporary and show partner Tom Mix and the half-Cherokee Will Rogers. Nat Love, the legendary Black gunman with the colorful autobiography, is listed as one of the models for Deadwood Dick—but in silent film, Deadwood Dick was played only by white actors. Alan Le May’s novel The Searchers was drawn from the real story of Black cowboy Britt Johnson, who single-handedly brought his wives back from Comanche captivity—the screen version went to John Wayne. Historian Art Burton goes further still, arguing that the model for the Lone Ranger was Bass Reeves, a former slave who became a deputy marshal and captured more than 3,000 criminals in his lifetime. Every time, the same trick: the story is real, its bearer Black, the screen white. Hollywood repainted heroics “color-blindly” just as ideology rewrote “manifest destiny”: the character was not removed—he was reassigned.
Pickett, though, lived another life as well: while the glamour went to Mix, his name did not vanish. In 1972, he became the first Black person inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame; in 1989, into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. And his event—steer wrestling—became one of rodeo’s seven canonical events: a discipline invented by a Black cowboy, mandatory to this day at every competition, including Houston’s. “When there are only seven events in rodeo, and one was invented by an African American—that is impressive,” summed up the vice president of that very rodeo. Those words, though, were not spoken until 2012—eighty years after Pickett’s death.
There is a man in this story without a label: Myrtis Dightman of Crockett, Texas. The son of a worker on a 4,000-acre ranch, he took bull riding seriously enough to reach the sport’s main stage: in 1964, he became the first Black rider at the National Finals Rodeo—the summit of the trade, the discipline’s “Super Bowl.” Before him, the profession had circulated advice, without irony: the best way to get into a white rodeo was to “paint yourself white.” Dightman chose another path: simply be the best. Seven NFR finals, third in the world in 1967, victory at Cheyenne Frontier Days in 1971. The press called him “the Jackie Robinson of rodeo”; today, a bronze statue of him stands at the entrance to Crockett’s rodeo arena. His son, Myrtis Jr., is trail boss of that same Prairie View ride, in the saddle since he was two, an auto-service technician by day: a family project lasting a lifetime, where 87 miles of dust are not reenactment but lineage.
And here is the closing irony: on screens in those years lived a mainstream Western where Black cowboys were still nowhere to be seen. To see a Black cowboy in film, you had to wait for Mario Van Peebles and his Posse (1993)—and even that was considered an experiment. Houston, meanwhile, was staging parades with fifteen hundred Black riders—and no one was filming them. Reality went too long without the rights to its own image.
The man who brought the Black cowboy back to screens in 1984 had a biography that seemed lifted from a novel: Lu Vason, boxer, soldier, barber, model, concert promoter. At Cheyenne Frontier Days, he looked at a rodeo without a single Black face and decided to fix exactly that: “I’m going to destroy the myth by creating a Black rodeo.” Everyone said he was crazy. That was how the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo was born—a tour through 30 cities, a talent school, and a living monument to Pickett, a museum at full gallop. 37 years later, the rodeo made prime time on CBS for the first time—on June 19, Juneteenth, the holiday marking the emancipation of Texas slaves, now written into the federal calendar as well. The circle closed, from whip to ring: the rodeo of Black cowboys was shown to the country on its national holiday.
And then something happened that not even a bold screenwriter could have predicted. Houston’s Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter in 2024—and the album she coolly described as “this is not a country album, this is a Beyoncé album” won Grammys both for Best Country Album and Album of the Year. At the NFL Christmas halftime show—the first show of its kind in Netflix history—she rode out on a white horse in a white fur coat, a precise reference to the woolies jackets, the uniform of early-20th-century Black cowboys; choreography with swangas and elements of the Prairie View Trail Riders’ procession turned the show into a love letter to Houston: the whole album is about her city and its Black cowboy culture. By the end of 2026, there is no reason to be surprised by a “Black cowboy”—just as there is no reason to be surprised that jazz is Black. All you have to do is step onto Houston’s streets in February, when the city stands across the traffic for a column of living riders. That is the answer from 1994: the cowboy never went anywhere. He is simply riding alongside you: 87 miles from Hempstead, a week of dust—and those who grew up in Third Ward recognize him before any screenwriter does.
The cowboy was never white. He was a slave set free with a skill more valuable than freedom on paper: staying in the saddle. He was the son of a former slave who invented one of the seven events of a national sport. He was the first to ride into a white rodeo final by doing the “impossible”—remaining himself. He invented a parade the city can no longer open without him.
Jason’s Lyric is good because it draws Third Ward honestly, without gloss—and in that honesty, the city reads more clearly than on any screen. Just remember, as you look at it: every street where this film was shot lets through, each February, a column of descendants of those who drove herds before rodeo had even learned to record itself on film. Cinema rewrote this cowboy twice. The trail—not once.
Sources: TSHA Handbook — Black Cowboys, William Pickett; JSTOR Daily — "Black Cowboys and the History of the Rodeo" (after Z. Patton & C. Schedlock, J. of African American History, 2011); NPS — "Engaging With Cowpoke History"; Houston Press — "Long Riders: How Black Trail Riders Made Their Way to the Houston Rodeo" (C. Curry, 2012); UH Digital Library — "Honoring Houston's African American Trail Riders"; Houstonia — Myrtis Dightman Jr. profile; Wikipedia — Jason's Lyric, Myrtis Dightman; PBR — "Lu Vason's Rodeo Dream" (K. R. Cartwright, 2021); The Guardian — "Where Have All the Black Cowboys Gone?" (2020); BBC Travel — "Cowboy Carter and Texas' Black Cowboy Culture" (2024–25); Forbes — Beyoncé's Christmas Halftime Show (2024); Kenneth W. Porter, "Negro Labor in the Western Cattle Industry, 1866–1900", Labor History 10:3 (1969).