Colorado’s Regional folklorists

If a month-long gourmet alumni tour to Umbria is out of reach this summer, could we interest you in a one-day bus ride to the Meeker Classic Sheepdog Championship Trials?

The Grand Junction-based Museum of Western Colorado is making a big push into cultural heritage tourism, according to Ronna Lee Sharpe, one of Colorado’s three regional folklorists, and the annual Meeker voyage is a hit. Another tour sponsored by the museum visits the Smithsonian in Washington, where participants view Colorado-related material.

There’s a lot to learn about sheepdogs that you’d never pick up from watching Babe – and that you’d probably miss without a professional folklorist along for the ride.

“Many of the people who train sheepdogs and use them, their families have been there for generations,” Sharpe says. “They talk about how working with sheepdogs is different from, for instance, working cattle from horseback. So we’re learning a lot about regional agriculture and how ways of life grow out of the ways people make a living.”

Getting people to talk is one way of describing Sharpe’s job. A folklorist isn’t a folk artist, but a scholar who studies how local artists contribute to their communities socially and economically.

“Most of us have masters or doctorates in folklore, so we have studied ways to do research and document and present traditional art and artists. But most of us don’t actually do any kind of art form,” Sharpe says.

Sharpe lives her mission: She met her husband, cowboy poet Tom Sharpe, while helping organize a cowboy poets’ conference, and now helps him train horses by watching supportively through the kitchen window. The day we spoke with her she was taking a quick break from a conference of saddlemakers meeting in the museum.

“We have a large meeting room downstairs, and right now it’s filled up with saddles,” Sharpe said. “We have some vendor booths and demonstration areas, because the public is going to start to come in around 6:00 tonight and learn a bit about custom saddlemaking in Colorado.”

The Colorado Saddlemakers Association formed a dozen years ago with a $500 mini-grant from the Colorado Council on the Arts and now includes more than 40 members. The association’s role in keeping a small industry alive is a great example of how supporting a way of life can also mean supporting a livelihood.

“A lot of craftspeople don’t share what they know with each other, and these people get together twice a year and help each other, so that they’re all making better saddles and doing better leatherwork,” Sharpe says.

What kind of money are we talking about?

“A couple thousand dollars,” says Sharpe. “And then if you want it to be really fancied up, it can go way up from there. It’s kind of a challenge because they like to do the artistic part of it, and of course that takes more time and creativity. But most of the saddlemakers still want to make saddles for the working cowboy, so they want to keep them simple enough and affordable enough so that the cowboy who’s making a couple thousand dollars a month can afford to get a good saddle, get what’s right for him and what’s right for his horse.”

Sometimes, convincing craftspeople to share what they know is hard because they’re uncomfortable with public speaking, or too humble to believe they even have anything to say that’s worth hearing. When that happens, Sharpe tries to arrange visual displays of their work.

“A lot of people we work with would never consider themselves to be artists,” Sharpe says. “If they’re quiltmakers or saddlemakers, they say, ‘It’s just what I do,’ and nobody’s ever really recognized it to the extent we’re trying to: the value of the art and the craftsmanship that goes into a lot of these things, and traditional skills and knowledge.

“Every stitch in a quilt carries a story with it. A lot of people, they’re doing what their mother learned to do from her mother who learned from her mother. They not only learned the techniques; it’s a link with people in their past.”

One of Sharpe’s best memories is meeting blacksmith Francis Whitaker, who passed away a few years ago.

“He had been an apprentice in Germany and Philadelphia, and studied under some of the old master ironworkers. He was one of the old timers, the most authentic person that you would ever run into,” Sharpe says.

Whitaker, who worked on buildings in New York and California earlier in his career, went on to open a teaching forge in Carbondale used by hundreds of ironworking students. On the Smithsonian trip, the group saw a photo of Whitaker that Sharpe had taken.

“He was like a book. You just wished you could know everything that was in his head,” she says.

Colorado’s other two folklorists are based in Greeley and in the San Luis Valley, where they focus largely on Hispanic culture and, in the case of Greeley, a special emphasis on fiber artists such as quiltmakers.

Says Sharpe: “We’re out in the communities trying to help other people with their work.”