Completely dry
Broken Bow Country We offer more than high quality apparel and lonely skeleton cowboy prints, we offer an honest ethos, not a stuffy, corporate, hypocritical “philosophy” like most clothing brands.
No, this is a spirit, driving this strong, silent exile through the suffocating heat of the endless desert.
“Until you get in front of people and they know you have credibility and ethics, most people aren’t going to be interested.”
Broken Bow Country
Instagram account Featuring enthusiastic videos filled with rebellion and culture. Lawless Culture.
I always thought that the creative fields of clothing design, printing, video editing and love of music were all the result of small company collaborations between artistically minded men with a nostalgic heart for the old world.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that Broken Bow Country was the work of a 17-year-old student at Columbine High School in Colorado, who took the SATs the day before the interview.
His name is Colton Patterson, and he’s an artist and country music fanatic who sees his craft as a path to “actually speaking truth, adding value to people’s lives, and giving them something that speaks to what they enjoy.”
When he started the Broken Bow Instagram account last December, it was primarily to curate and share videos he liked. He quickly realized that his edits were appealing to hundreds of people.
From there the number grew by the thousands, then by hundreds of thousands, and eventually I had 500,000 followers.
“I couldn’t believe it. It’s such a blessing to have a place and something that I enjoy and love and be able to put it in front of so many people. Thank God. I’d never met them.”
He finds his success humbling: “If I never got anything in return I probably would have continued doing this. I would have continued painting and listening to country classics. So it’s incredible that this is actually popular and that you can do it as a job.”
I asked Colton what people at school think of his brand and his art.
“It’s hard to get most people to understand. Everybody thinks it’s cool that it’s famous and out there, but most people don’t really care about super grandpa country music or painting. It’s still low key, but people recognize it, they watch it, they appreciate it.”
Pop country is the worst.
Colton recalls going on road trips with his family when he was 6 or 7 years old: “We were in the car and my dad was playing John Wayne on the car’s CD player and movie screen. We saw ‘The Searchers’ and ‘The Cowboys.’ I loved John Wayne.”
His great-grandfather always did westerns. “It was all John Wayne stuff and I just sat there and didn’t understand what was going on, but I saw the cowboys riding around on their horses and I knew I loved it. That’s always stayed with me and is what I do.”
“I’ve always loved country music,” Colton says. “It’s something I’ve always connected to my grandparents, my dad, everybody. And as an artist, I love doing that, so I wanted to put all the stuff that I love and that I think other people would love in one place and share it all. I thought I was good at it, and it worked out, so I’m so grateful. I get to have this collection and archive of stuff that I love and the great songs that don’t get talked about as much.”
He loves George Jones, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
He listens to music while he creates, helping him get into a creative “flow state.”
For example, Marty Robbins’ album The Gunfighter activates the flow state: “If that doesn’t get you in the mood, nothing else will.”
He also likes “Ralph Stanley, a bluegrass musician from Kentucky.”
He played with Keith Whitley. You know, he was the rhythm guitarist in his band long before he was famous. And they worked together. He’s one of the best bluegrass musicians of all time. He’s amazing. He can do a lot of different things, from Western gunslinger-style stuff to very sad portraits and scenes. I think he fits very well with the cowboy spirit that encompasses the whole genre of country music, and the mystical cowboy of the West.
If you look around, you won’t find any other genre of music or culture that preaches pure, good nature, or the kind of stories and values that you really get in country music, because in country music, we’re telling stories about people who have been through hard times and people who are trying to find God, and a lot of it is about God, too, which is a big thing.
He stops.
“And cowboys,” he added. “I just think cowboys are cool.”
I asked him if he was the kind of kid who would draw on anything.
“Yes, of course! I’ve always been drawing. It’s something my mom did and I learned to draw well through repeated practice. It’s something I truly love and I’ve always wanted to use as a real outlet, like my business does now. I’m so grateful that drawing is at the heart of everything I do now.”
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Not a fan His most striking expression of contempt for the modern state was Johnny Cash skeleton image He made the same rude gesture he had made in life.
Jokingly, the location of the post is set in San Quentin Prison.
“There’s certainly some good modern country music out there, but a lot of it is just trash,” Colton says.
He hopes that will change.
He is particularly upset about Morgan Wallen: “I disparaged him on that account and I’m sorry about that, but I don’t like the way country music is treated and I don’t give a damn to a lot of country music. George Jones would be writhing in his grave.”
For example, the Applebee’s song.
When I told him I hadn’t heard him, he was genuinely relieved.
“The values of country music, the values I was talking about, the values that I really identify with, are completely lost in most of the music coming out today,” he tells me.
Because most of these party songs are just about getting drunk and doing whatever, and they’re just things that can be popularized and commercialized and played on the radio, and they don’t really speak to people’s emotions, or real stories, or how people feel.
Guys like George Jones and Waylon Jennings made songs out of people who were pawns of the biggest country stars who wore rhinestone suits on commercial radio and onstage.
But then they shifted to music that was really about real problems people had, like alcoholism and breaking up with women — things that you don’t want to talk about on mainstream radio. And that’s really been lost. New Country doesn’t have that.
I hope it doesn’t stagnate or anything happens, but really the goal is to just keep putting content out and continuing to curate what people want to see, what they enjoy, and what isn’t being published elsewhere. As time goes on, I’m just trying to stick with it.
tradition
Along with staying humble, Colton is also mindful of staying authentic.
“What I realized pretty early on was that no one was going to care unless you just put it in front of them and showed them that you could add value to their lives,” Colton says. “I suppose I could start out with just painting and post as much as I wanted, but until I got in front of people and they saw that it had credibility and spirit, they were not going to care nearly as much.”
“But by having a page and showing that I’m always finding this kind of stuff and being able to create a collection of stuff that people enjoy seeing and stuff that I love, it creates a community and a group of people that know their tastes and what they like. It’s all about being really authentic, because you can’t tell them anything. People see through it when you’re faking it or when you’re just trying to get ahead or have a bit of clout with them.”
“The situation is not the best,” Colton says, “but culturally, the values you’re talking about, we’ve definitely seen a resurgence of conservatism in the ’70s as people came out of the ’60s, and so when you see that peak, that pendulum swing so far, people are doing crazy things. They’re like, OK, we’ve got to step back and go back to traditional values. And I think that’s exactly what’s happening right now.”
I tell him I have seen it too in the faith of his generation.
“Faith is definitely coming back in a big way. More people are believing in God than ever before, at least in the last few years. There are a lot of people my age who are believing in God and embracing it more, because now people are realizing and understanding that they have strayed too far from God, and now is the time to come back and be drawn back to Him.”
