Section Links: COWPIE Main → Song Index → FAQs → Song Submissions → COWPIE Newsletter → Guitar Resources

COWPIE Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What's COWPIE all about?: A. It stands for COuntry and Western Pickers of the IntErnet. The acronym came to me late one night at the point between wakefulness and sleep. COWPIE's purpose in life is to allow guitar players who enjoy country music (and it's many substyles) to contact one another and swap songs, techniques, and information without wading through all the mixture of musical styles covered in the usenet groups. It consists of the COWPIE News e-mail newsletter and the archive site of country songs.
Q. Where's the website?: A. COWPIE has moved around a few times, and even though I try to get them updated, some links to older outdated sites still exist. The official site is now located at: http://www.roughstock.com/cowpie as of early 1997.
Q. How do I subscribe/unsubscribe to the newsletter?: A. Subscriptions are handled at the subscribe page http://www.roughstock.com/Subscribe.html on the website. There you can choose to subscribe or unsubscribe. To change addresses, unsubscribe with the old one and then subscribe with the new one.
We have in place an email verification system. That means that you will have to respond to an automatic email sent to you after you subscribe. This is an attempt to prevent invalid email addresses from being entered into the system and have to subsequently be manually removed. It also prevents someone from signing up other people who aren't really interested. If you are unable to figure out how to send in the needed reply, use the feedback form link at the bottom of the page to send a message and we'll help you.
Q. I can't find song X in the archives. Do you know where it might be?: A. No. All the country guitar songs on the Internet that I know about are in COWPIE. Be sure to check the search engine to see if the song is listed under a different artist than you expect it to be. If you happen to find other country guitar songs that aren't here, then please send them to me (with the proper attributions). If you want to place a request in the COWPIE Newsletter, then feel free to write in a request.
Q. Why don't the chords line up correctly over the song lyrics?: A. Because the Internet consists of people using all sorts of computer operating systems and application programs, song files are formatted as monospaced ASCII text. Now, to explain what those terms mean, text is just what it sounds like, but we must be careful not to confuse it with word processor files. They store their data in different formats based on the program and include a lot of formatting options (bold, italics, etc). ASCII is a sort of common computer alphabet so that if you write the letter 'A' on one system, then another one will recognize it as such. It covers just the basic Roman alphabet with some control characters (which you probably won't use). Monospaced means that each letter occupies the same width on a line of text. To display it this way you'll need to use a monospaced font (sometimes called typewriter font). Some common examples are Courier and Monaco. When you write songs, be sure to use one of these fonts and use spaces instead of tabs to line up the chords over the lyrics. Tabs will expand to different numbers of spaces on different systems and even in different programs on the same system.
In case it's still not clear, here's a quick test you can do to see if you're viewing something with a monospaced font: Write two lines of 10 characters, one of 'w's and one of 'i's, like this:
wwwwwwwwww
iiiiiiiiii
If they're the same length (they are not here) then you're in a monospaced font. Here's what it looks like in one:
wwwwwwwwww iiiiiiiiii
Q. I've got broad musical tastes and I'd like to find some songs that aren't country. Do you know where I could find some?: A. Try OLGA (On-Line Guitar Archive) at http://www.olga.net. That's the grandaddy of guitar music sites. OLGA currently has much of its material offline due to legal issues. You can read more details about that on their website. The Links page has pointers to any OLGA mirrors that are still operational that I know about.
Q. What's up with these tar.gz files you've got scattered around this site? Don't you realize that zip is the only "proper" thing to use?: A. That's actually a fairly standard Internet format. Tar is an archiver (which means that it takes multiple files and combines them into one), and gzip is a compression utility (it usese the gz extension). Though some people who've never used anything besides various Microsoft Windows incarnations don't realize this, the Internet is quite a heterogeneous network supporting many different operating systems. Zip is not available for all of them. Tar and gzip are -- and there are free versions of them. If you don't already have a compression utility installed that can handle them, I suggest you go to http://www.download.com and download WinZip. If you're a Mac user, Stuffit Expander will open gzipped files, too.
Q. Can you help me figure out who sang this particular song for which I only know part of the lyrics?: A. COWPIE is not a country fandom site, though you can visit the main Roughstock site with those types of questions. The COWPIE audience is primarily country guitar players on the Internet (hence the acronym COWPIE -- see FAQ question #1). The Roughstock staff will do our best to help you locate the answers.

Roughstock: Roughstock Country Countdown - COWPIE Lyrics & Guitar Tab
History Of Country Music - Country Music News
CD Reviews - Stacy Harris - more...

Resources: Countdown Archives - Country Music News - CD Releases - Country on T.V.
RIAA Awards - Today in Country Music
Interactive Forums: Planet Garth Forums - shaniaforums.com - COWPIE
Network Sites: Planet Garth - shania.net - shaniaforums.com - stwain.com - more...

Roughstock, the Bronc Rider and Wheat "R" Device are trademarks of Cheri Media Group.

Copyright © 1993-2007 Cheri Media Group.
All Rights Reserved.
Refer general questions about this site or Roughstock to: rodeo@roughstock.com
or use our feedback form.
Privacy Policy - Terms of Service - About Roughstock