The Cowboy Killers perform forgotten music from a forgotten era; from a time before American music had been forced into plastic boxes and pressed onto consumers; a time when music was still a channel through which ordinary people expressed themselves to each other and themselves. It is in the end “traditional” or “roots” music because it offers a window and a link to times past, and to the outlaws and prophets, sinners and saints, disasters and jubiliations which filled them. Several years ago, legs dangling out of a one-eyed bandit, Charles Alabaster Booth, the last known issue of the once great Booth banjo dynasty bummed a cigarette from a young, misguided teenage runaway. Booth lent Mike Ellison (for that was the name he gave) the queen of spades he had been carrying in his back pocket as collateral, and the rest slowly became history. The two traveled northward, ending up in the promise-turned-wasteland of New York City.