When outsiders hear that Drake LeBlanc spends his weekends in his hometown, Lafayette, La., trail riding with friends, they might be forgiven if they imagine that the 27-year-old horseman meanders through the woods nose-to-tail with a few other cowboys. After all, that’s what “trail ride” often means elsewhere: a placid, al fresco mounted stroll.
Yet when LeBlanc, a documentary filmmaker, rides his Tennessee Walking Horse, Koupé, it is alongside sometimes hundreds or even thousands of other riders, most of whom are Creole or Black like him. They ride to the beat of Zydeco music thumping from sound systems on flatbed trailers that wend between the trees alongside the horses. And they snack on pork steak sandwiches handed over by chefs tending smokers in the backs of pickup trucks trundling beside the herd.
Across the American South, this version of a trail ride has grown from a traditional community event into a collective show of Black horsemanship, a celebration with the vibe of a cookout astride, with its own line dances, theme songs and swag.
“I think the trail ride is one of the most beautiful representations of the complexity of Louisiana culture,” LeBlanc said in an interview in May. “You can see us pay homage to our ancestors and the people who come before us that were share croppers and cattle ranchers and cowboys and people who did the hard work. And you can also see how these often-oppressed communities make the most out of what they have access to,” he added. “And how we continue to preserve our culture.”
With scores of Black trail ride clubs from Texas to the Carolinas alone, according to some counts, such an extravaganza can be found cantering any weekend across many Black Southern communities. They have blossomed from more sedate, family-reunion-style affairs of decades ago to days-long horsy shindigs that can draw up to 15,000 people, like the Ebony Horsemen Trail Ride does in Shelby, N.C.
But just how they got started is unclear. What is known is that the cowboys who worked the bayou ranches were enslaved West Africans, according to Andrew Sluyter, the author of “Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500-1900” and a professor at Louisiana State University. After the Haitian revolution, he said, free Black equestrians emigrated to Louisiana. After emancipation and long into the 20th century, Black people were excluded from white-only rodeos and formed their own enclaves of cowboy culture. Trail rides appear to have evolved from there.
“Africans had a great horse culture in and of itself, and the African people who arrived here mostly as slaves certainly knew a lot about cattle and horses,” Sluyter said. “They were responsible, along with others for establishing equestrian culture.”
He added: “Today, you find Black trail riders all the way from Compton to Pennsylvania,” Sluyter said. “But there is not a firm origin story for trail rides. They are just a celebration of Black, Creole life.”
For some trail riders, horses have always been a part of their lives. Charles Pryor, 55, a contractor from North Carolina, said he started riding at age 9, but for much of his life, the other Black cowboys he saw were his younger brothers. Then in 2005, he was invited on a trail ride in Ramseur, N.C.; he was hooked — and moved.
“I saw all of those people, Black people with horses, and everybody was getting along, like family,” said Pryor, whom everyone on the trail knows as Chuck. “It was mind-blowing.”
Today and for the past two decades, he has hosted the Ebony Horseman Saddle Club’s trail ride, a multiday extravaganza with line dancing, concerts and thousands of riders. He still gets that same feeling as the first time, he said, when he looks out at the sea of Black cowboys and cowgirls.
“It makes us feel strong because we’re all together, and we got something that we can call ours,” Pryor said. “For a weekend, for a brief moment.”
Trail rides typically assemble at fair or camp grounds where riders tailgate beside their trailers and then mount up, heading into the woods in a vast herd of horses.
Trail riders say that interest and attendance has exploded; some attribute it to Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” album spotlighting Black cowboy culture. Mark Wynn, a line-dance musician from Cleveland, known as Big Mucci, had never heard of the trail rides when he started getting sent video clips of his dances performed at them — sometimes on the horses’ backs.
He was inspired to compose the “Trail Riders Shuffle” in 2019, featuring an artist named Rico C: “Cowboy, cowgirls this for you — especially them ladies in them Daisy Dukes,” and said he was instantly embraced.
He shot the music video with the horses and riders of the 101 Backwood Riders United trail ride in Rockmart, Ga., as backup dancers. At one point during the shoot, Wynn said, he was flabbergasted when a cowboy had his actual horse perform the steps of the shuffle.
“It was a whole new culture that I never knew about that I got introduced to and that accepted me as far as the music; they made me an honorary trail rider,” Wynn said. “That’s what trail riding is about, a big family culture.”
For Avery Jackson, a dressage trainer based near Athens, Ga., who started his equestrian career training trail horses, the music and party aspect can obscure for a wider audience what he feels is the trail ride’s more essential role: to underscore that Black horsemen and women not only exist, but always have.
“It’s the story around what makes Black people in trail riding and horses special beyond the music, because it is something about the horses that I think is continuously getting erased,” he said. “It’s the way Black people have been able to work with horses and create a relationship that defies our physical reality.”
For some, the trail ride has helped rewrite the narrative about Black equestrians’ place in the riding world. The first time Jeff Neal, 53, a firefighter in Raleigh, N.C., saw a Black person on a horse was visiting his in-laws in the rural town of Knightdale. “My first response was: Those Black guys just stole somebody’s horse,” he said. “I had never seen a Black person on a horse, whether it was movies, in person or whatever.”
The rider turned out to be his father-in-law, who, two weeks later, helped Neal buy his first horse. That was 28 years ago, and Neal has been helping lead trail rides ever since. Today he is a chaplain on horseback, who specializes in leading kickoff prayers at each ride.
The rise in popularity has its drawbacks, Neal said. He’s cut back his trail ride schedule, turned off by neophytes who seem to be more interested in socializing than building equestrian skills.
“We’re getting away from the horses,” he said. “We’ve made it more of a party like you see the boots on the ground and the line dancing. We’ve gotten away from the horse aspect of it. It’s not a trend for me — it’s a lifestyle,” he added.
But it doesn’t stop him from enjoying the trails, riding his Spotted Saddle Horse, Dream. “But when I do see my people into horses and that the horses are taken care of, they’re taking care of themselves, and they’re represented in the right way,” he said. “Listen, it makes my heart smile so big.”
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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