Music's In Our 'Jeans'

A banjo, a saddle and bones

Ed Lockwood outside the 010 Bunkhouse, Harrison, NE 1888

Born in Brooklyn, New York on June 16th, 1851, Edmund Charles Lockwood Jr. hailed from deep New England roots and was also blessed with the British charm and wit of his dear mum, a striking beauty, Mary Martin Lockwood of Wittersham, Kent, England.

As a lad, Edmund worked as a bookeeper, alongside his chum, Theodore Roosevelt at his father's New York City Mirror and Glass Company. When Teddy left for the far reaches of the west, Edmund would recieve postcards from this adventurous lad, pleading for Ed to leave the 4 walls of his office and escape into the wonders and opportunities of the wild west.

At 30 years old, Edmund did exactly that. Leaving all and everything familiar, he left that big old city and headed out to the threshes of "Indian Territory" into the wild blue yonder eatern Wyoming and the Nebraska panhandle.

It was here near the small prairie town of Harrison, Nebraska that he found a job as a cowboy and chuckwagon cook on the 010 Coffee Ranch near the banks of Hat Creek. Ed resided with the rest of the musical cowboys in the bunkhouse when he was not on trail driving cattle down to Kansas and Texas.

Coffee and his cowboys on the plains of northwest Nebraska

                                   NEBRASKA

    My lineage has led me northwest to the corner of
    this forgotten, empty land. Historic lore is now
    a sign posted alongside the tall prairie grass.

    I walk on this land of ghosts with pride and
    wonder. "Nebraska, the good life,"  Your soil
    embedded in the creases of my genes.

        Ed Lockwood served as the Chuck Wagon Cook
         as well as all 'round cowboy and banjo player.

Emma Woody Lockwood

On a balmy summer afternoon at a church sponsered
picnic, Ed was to meet Emma Woody, the spunky Quaker woman with the great ankles, who would become his wife, partner and mother of his three children.

In the early spring of 1884 Daniel Wheeler Woody gathered his family and a few precious belongings to set out from the familiarity of their North Carolina Quaker community into the adventurous unkown. Along the way, this ingenious, talented family would put on musical shows for fellow travelers, often receiving gratuities as well as applause. Little Rose Woody would dance "like nobody's business" until the coins dropped rapidly in the old beaver hat!