Country music has always loved the cowboys.

All the way back to Gene Autry, Randolph Scott  and Roy Rogers. We've sung about them, tried to look like them and pretended to be them. We've had dime store cowboys, drug store cowboys and coca-cola cowboys. We've sung about how cowboys don't get lucky all the time, about cowboys and clowns and how our heroes have always been cowboys.

And of course, remember mama's, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys!

Which brings me to one of my all time favorite songwriters, the guy who wrote 'Mama's Don't Let Your babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys'.

I've loved the work of Ed Bruce for decades. Whether it was songs he had hits with himself ('You're The Best Break', 'My First Taste Of Texas', 'Girls, Women and Ladies') or great songs he wrote for other artists (Tanya Tucker's 'Texas (When I Die)' and many more), Ed Bruce has a genius for stringing words together and making you stop...listen...think.

The only problem is, 'ol Ed may have been born about a century too late. When he writes those great country cowboy songs, you can almost see him sittin' by a campfire somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, a herd of cattle back along the horizon, sipping on a tin cup of bad coffee.

And so it was that Ed wrote what I believe is the greatest cowboy song ever. In fact, it was 'The Last Cowboy Song'. Pull up a saddle, tilt that cowboy hat back, choke down one more cup of that tumbleweed java and let's say goodbye to the cowboy of the great American Old West.

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