It’s a Saturday afternoon, and Fellini’s on Howell Mill Road in Atlanta is packed during lunchtime.
Suddenly, several folks crowd around a window to watch a man riding down the street toward them on a brown and white horse.
Children beg for permission to go outside as the man parks the horse next to the restaurant.
“Can we pet her?” they ask.
“Of course,” he answers, taking off his black cowboy hat and resting his leather boots on a railing. “Her name is Rock n Roll. She’s really friendly.”
It’s easy to forgive the excitement — it’s not every day you see a horse trotting down a major street in Atlanta with an honest-to-goodness cowboy.
But pedaling in the commonplace isn’t Brannu Fulton’s strong suit — and he isn’t your average cowboy. For one thing, there’s the silver broken record medallion he wears around his neck to accessorize his traditional cowboy getup, a reminder of his days touring as a DJ for rapper J-Kwon.
And then there’s the fact that he called a horse stall in a McDonough barn home for nearly a year while he saved up money to buy more horses and get his horse riding academy off the ground. That meant no indoor plumbing, no hot water and no stove.
So how did the 25-year-old go from eating lobster on private jets with music stars to eating Ramen noodles, sleeping on the floor and counting seven horses among his best friends?
“It was cool for a minute, but I felt like I was supposed to be fulfilled, and I wasn’t,” Fulton said of his music career. “I didn’t know what it was at the time. Now I know what it was — it was the animals.”
Growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., his grandfather would take him to the Jamaica Bay Riding Academy for male bonding time.
“His smile got bigger when we got to the stable,” grandfather George Briggs said. “He would say, ‘I’m going to buy my own horse when I grow up.’”
But it would be years before that happened, or before Fulton even thought about horses again. He enrolled at Clark Atlanta University, got a name around Atlanta as a party and club DJ and dropped out three credits shy of getting his degree to go on tour with J-Kwon.
It was only after renting a beige Paso Fino for the day during a tour stop in Mexico that Fulton rediscovered his childhood passion. When he got back to Atlanta, he developed a plan: He was going to be the DJ with the horse.
He admits it wasn’t an easy sell to his friends in the music industry.
“I thought he was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs when he told me,” said hip-hop pioneer Biz Markie, who mentored Fulton as he was growing up. “But I saw his passion for it.”
Fulton used some savings and sold some DJ equipment to buy his first horse, Spinderella (a nod to the DJ for hip-hop duo Salt-n-Pepa), a brown and white American Paint Horse, and an old horse farm in McDonough. He watched other people as they trained their horses and asked questions.
Within a few months, the once skittish horse was comfortable enough around people that Fulton was able to start bringing her to children’s birthday parties and church festivals. “If you treat them a certain way, they act a certain way,” he said.
In the past year, he added seven more horses to the roster at Brannu Paint Academy. Their names: Salsa, Neo Soul, Hip Hop, Rock n Roll, Classical Symphony, Rhythm and Opera.
He spends his days working with the horses and fixing up stalls and, until recently, his nights in the barn poring over horse behavior books. On the weekends, he leads trail rides and takes the horses out to events. He started riding down streets downtown to drum up business and give the horses more experience interacting with people.
Fulton has big plans for the future. On his list: turning three stalls into customized suites where children taking lessons can relax with their families and using part of the land to create an educational “city” called Brownsville that kids can ride through.
His grandfather often tells him to slow down and focus on one thing at a time. But for as many ideas as he has for the business, he says none are as important as the charitable impact he hopes to make with the horses. He often lets people donate gently used clothing, which he gives to charities, in exchange for riding lessons, and he plans to take the horses to schools in disadvantaged areas to work with students. Spinderella’s bridle is decorated with a pink rhinestone ribbon to raise breast cancer awareness.
“A horse is a great tool to take you through the ups and downs of life,” he said.
