Guest Blogger Damon Suede Shares AMBLIN’ MAN: the universal appeal of the cowboy saunter

Thanks so much for inviting me over to Wild and Wicked Cowboys to celebrate the release of Lickety Split. The book came out yesterday and I’m seriously proud of my first cowboy romance. I grew up in Texas, and my family owns a ranch, but it’s taken me a long time to find a story set down there that needed me to tell it. Patch and Tucker just wouldn’t take no.

Today, I wanted to talk about that walk that cowboys have. You know the one I mean, the easy good ol’ boy saunter that owns any room and draws the eye.

Country singles sing about that walk like it’s all in the loose hips, the hang of the jeans or even the scuff of the boots. Movie westerns focus on the props: chaps and spurs, saddle and lasso, but that’s not really it either. The gait can be bowlegged or stiff, easy or eager, but it conveys a total physical confidence right through any clothes that happen to be in the way.

Personally, I think it comes from spending a couple thousand hours on the back of a big animal in all weather, learning to work together. Just logic and habit. After a while you learn to work with the horse rather than against it, your hips give in and the two of you move like one thing at any pace from trot to gallop. It’s a dance of sorts, between your butt and the saddle, but you’re always rolling against the horse’s rhythm. That translates into the best two-stepping, that glorious, glassy glide you get dancing with folks from Texas, Arkansas, and parts of Oklahoma. LOL After a couple decades on horseback, you walk different, sit different…hell, you even stand different because riding changes the way you use your body and where you put your weight.

Growing up in Texas I saw it all the time, but I only really analyzed it the first time I tried to fake it.

Back in my twenties I was onstage in London playing a hustler at a theatre in Covent Garden. Now, these Brits had no experience of cowboys, or even Americans really, outside of tourists and sitcoms. My costume was pretty understated, loose jeans, old harness boots, and a longsleeved undershirt. It was the boots that gave me the idea.

For my initial entrance, I literally ambled on stage and stood silent for about 3 minutes before talking. To be fair, the walk I gave this character was stolen wholesale from my family’s farrier, a cocky young sumbuck who’d been a field hand, foreman, and even a stint as a bullrider, before he decided he liked his spine sound and his brains unscrambled and started shoeing horses for local ranches. And lord was he sexy… hotter than Hell in pajamas. LOL A legit kicker. That walk told a whole story and I swiped it.

In rehearsal, I didn’t even question the impulse: I was playing a male prostitute from a grubby Nevada town about the size of a train crossing and a gas station… The character wasn’t flashy or slick at all, but he needed to have a certain amount of relaxed swagger…which is how the farrier’s walk came to mind. No way in hell could I ever spend as much time on a horse as he had, and for all the mechanical bulls I’ve bested, I will never in my life sit on the back of the real thing. But this guy had done all that, a LOT… and the way he moved across a space just pulled your eye to him. So I took what I could, pulled on my Luccheses, and prayed for grace. LOL

This character had so few lines, but he needed to matter for the story to land right. I knew I could steal the whole play if I could make him dominate the space the way he needed to. Weeks I spent trying to approximate what came so natural to our farrier. In rehearsal, one of the actresses teased me about it, “That fookin’ strut!” and she’d slap my ass and laugh because it worked exactly as I’d hoped. The director was thrilled. I was doing a ghost of an impression of course, and I probably only got it about 20% right. But once we opened, that cowboy walk got me rave reviews (and even an oddball award) because of the illusion of history it built into the play. And ever since, I paid close attention to the way that walk works.

Anytime I read a cowboy romance, I’m always hyperattuned to the way the characters move. It’s probably easier to do it than write it; being onstage or on-film is one thing, but fiction’s a funny thing to help people visualize. So much of a story happens in heads: yours, the critics’, the readers’… Doesn’t matter really. I can always tell when authors really know how to talk that walk and usually they’re folks who know it well, better than I ever will.

When I started outlining Lickety Split, I spent a lot of time, more time than is sensible probably, thinking about how Patch Hastle and Tucker Biggs walked through the book. Of course, the way they moved taught me how they danced, fought, and fooled around. It mapped out their environment and their journey. Before I knew it their walks had given me their personalities, their backstories, their pacing, and even the book’s title: Lickety Split.