How Sam Shepard, the Actor and Pulitzer-Winning Playwright, Inspired the Term “Cowboy Mouth”
With news this morning from Sam Shepard’s Kentucky farm that the actor and Pulitzer-winning playwright has died at 73, Patti Smith’s description of him in Just Kids, her seminal memoir, seems more poetic now than ever. She first glimpsed the multihyphenate creative in Greenwich Village, drumming for a band called the Holy Modal Rounders, and thought him “rugged, smart, and intuitive” with an “infectious laugh.” Smith and Shepard met in their twenties, long before he became the reluctant star of such films as Days of Heaven and The Right Stuff, but she immediately saw him as the embodiment of the American West. “In my mind, he was the fellow with the cowboy mouth,” she writes.
Whether the term referenced Bob Dylan’s 1966 song “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” or Smith dreamed it up all on her own—“Cowboy Mouth” became the title of a 1971 play Smith and Shepard cowrote, reportedly by passing one typewriter back and forth—it’s more than an apt account of one of the actor’s most striking features. His rugged, brooding grimace was softened only by the charming—though equally wicked—gleam in his midnight blue eyes. The often toothpick-accessorized pout, which was slightly downturned at the corners, lent his face a knowing, if melancholy, quality. Clint Eastwood’s 1976 outlaw Josey Wales had similar chops, and Paul Newman’s Luke Jackson, in Cool Hand Luke (1967), also memorably employed a similar mug as a rebel hero. The difference is that Shepard’s expression—honed during his early years as a stable hand, fruit picker, and sheep shearer—was no pose. Here, a look back at the American icon and his forever charming cowboy mouth.
