A few years ago, I was on tour with the Czech post-punk band Ememvoodoopöká. While we were driving off to yet another gig in some half-filled pub, I saw a sign along the side of the road that advertised an Old West town. Thinking it a summertime anomaly, I said nothing. A few years later, while canoeing an afternoon away on the Váh with a bunch of wine-soaked Slovakian hipsters, someone started spontaneously singing an American country song, albeit with Slovak lyrics. When I asked about it, the fleet of canoes pulled close and started telling me about Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, the most famous Native Americans. Didn’t I know about them? And the man who chronicled their lives, the great Western writer Karl May?

No, I had no idea really about this German guy named May, whose made-up Native American tales have been translated into 30 languages and printed 200 million times, and whose death in 1912 deeply bummed a young Hitler. They quickly filled me in on their understanding of Apache history, as described by May, who’d never set foot in America when writing his books (and was later found to have plagiarized travel guides extensively), and then sang a medley of songs in this forever troubling tongue, but whose melodies were terribly familiar—was that Cash, Kristofferson, Seeger? What’s more is I had no idea that above the Czech punk underground I had so loved from afar laid a whole separate parallel culture of supreme weirdness that had escaped my view, mostly because it was everywhere: Czech tramping, probably the biggest, longest running and most defining subculture of the country.

Like hip-hop or punk, tramp music is not just a genre, it’s a way of life. And its narrative runs about as deep as the history of the nation itself. Shortly after World War I, fed-up scouts, besmogged urban workers, and daredevils started taking trains out to the woods to hike around and spend nights under the open sky. They had read May and seen silent American Western films and wanted to be big men with more freedoms than those of the cities, schools, and factories.

These “cowboys” first begged shelter from farmers, but soon began setting up their own camps with names like Lone Star and Montana, using logs felled from the forest or various debris brought from the city to make ramshackle huts. Over the next eight decades, these huts, called chata, would become one of the country’s defining vernacular architectural treasures. The tramps also built totem poles and saloons, elected seřifs to rule their compounds, and quickly moved from singing current cabaret favorites to writing original songs, or adapting American folk tunes into Czech to be sung by a chorus of camp members round the fire each night. This was the first generation of tramp music and along with swing jazz it became a kind of foundational pop music of the country.

The Nazis weren’t into Czechs and Slovaks playing pretend in the woods, and so the tramp camps were abandoned in the late 1930s. When the Communists came to power, they resented the imperialist sheen of these communities and, although the music thrived at campfires and in bars on those dreary weekends of the Stalin years, little of it would end up recorded. Instead, the tramp music became something entirely different–a hardcore contemporary oral tradition, passed from one guitarist or fiddler to another, with handwritten lyric books to jog the memories for huge lots of singers (all the tramps sang together around the fire no matter how bad their voices). And all the stuff waved in from Radio Free Europe, sneaked back by relatives traveling in the West or mailed from friends abroad, would be brought into the tramp music mix–like rock ‘n’ roll (big beat) and country & western. Then, one holy day in 1964, bluegrass came to town via Pete Seeger, and the Czechs caught their first glimpse of this strange creature called the banjo. Before that, they had only guessed at what the queer plucky sound was, and soon after Seeger’s performance, Marko Čermak built the country’s first from pictures of the gig.

After the ‘68 tanks rolled in, a lot of Czechs decided that the tramps had it right with the whole rejection of modernity thing, and the 1970s were, as then dissident playwright Václav Havel said, a time for turning inward, living in truth in the privacy of one’s home, away from the Sauron gaze of the StB. In this era, tramp music bumped against Czech protest folk like that of Jaroslav Hutka and Karel Kryl, and dropped some of the Romantic spirit in favor of more gritty views of the times. Still, the antlers hung, sausages roasted, and battered acoustics twanged some version of the pioneer dreamtime.

After Communism ended in November ‘89, the tramp culture went from being a kind of inter-generational weekend getaway to become more the leisure of old timers and diehards. It became more professionalized and a little freeze dried. A couple of the serious tramp bands have toured the states and played Nashville, and although they wanted to play country, the Nashville people always wanted them to play the “real” folk music of the Czech Republic, the tramp music. I guess the Czechs just smile and do some originals, but the whole business seems rather odd to me. American country music is their real folk music, after all. The Bohemian forests are the real country, and they are the real cowboys. Next time I’m with the post-punk posse, I’m going to make them stop to pay homage at that Old West town. Those punks pretend they don’t know the songs until they’ve had a few, and then it’s like when the DJ drops “Brick House” at the wedding reception—expected, necessary, unconditional, and immediate participation required.