Come all you good old cowboys
                    And listen to my rhymes—
We are West of Eastern Texas
                    And mostly men of crimes. …

—“cowboy” song

For most of the twentieth century the so‐called cowboy song has been generally accepted as an authentic area of American folklore. In such collections of songs as those of John and Alan Lomax a wide variety of western lyrics and music has long been accepted as true folk‐material of a distinctly distinguishable American subculture, although there are frequently startling differences among the various images which these songs present. So much of this material is implicitly and sentimentally romantic that the whole notion that it represents an authentic image of the cowboy must finally be questioned—particularly that which envisions him singing at his daily rounds, soothing his cattle and enlivening his daily life with the plaintive comforts of his tunes. Too many “collections”—some as recently as 1964—range themselves on the positive side of this vision, producing not only the songs but an expressed faith that they are—as Chauncey Moore describes his collection¹—“saturated with the spirit of early‐day Oklahoma”—or Montana, or Texas, or someplace else in the West.

No one seems to want to go beyond this combination of testimony and song, which characterizes not only the popular but many more serious compendiums. It has seemed unnecessary, since real Westerners sang real songs into the collector's microphones.

But an odd difference occurs when one goes to other sources to discover the cowboy. First of all, the cowboy himself—that is, the cowboy who hasn't volunteered to sing—is not only a considerably coarser creature than these songs portray him, but tends pretty much to ignore song. Of some twenty volumes on the cowboy, ten of which were autobiographies written anytime from the 1870's to the 1920's, I found only two which made any extensive reference to singing—E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott's We Pointed Them North and Ike Blasingame's Dakota Cowboy. Of Blasingame's three references, two are non‐occupational, one occurring in a honky‐tonk joke and the other in a respectable Victorian parlor around a piano. Both are worth noting, since they perhaps reveal more about the actual place of song in the cowboy's life than the other reference, which concerns a traditional situation, singing to the herd: a circumstance much beloved of the Western story, but not much concerned with the real nature of cowboy life, as Blasingame admits.

Abbott, on the other hand, frequently refers to singing and claims composition of at least one cowboy song himself. But this is only one book out of a random selection of twenty—and a book whose reliability I have grave doubts about. I knew “Teddy Blue” personally; his ranch was only a couple of miles from the rural school I attended in Montana. I have heard many of the tales in We Pointed Them North from the old man himself; I would not accuse any man of being a liar, but I heard at least three different versions of some of those tales from him. At the time Helena Huntington Smith took down his story, Abbott had for many years basked in the glory of being the last of the old time Texas cowboys. It is possible that, like many another oldtimer, he was adding to the romantic myth himself by this time.

The book itself supports the notion. It is surprising, for instance, how many famous and romantic Western characters Abbott seems to have known personally. The list ranges from Sam Bass (who is supposed to have worked on his father's ranch) to Theodore Roosevelt, met during the rustling activities in the '80's. And when he talks about singing to the herd, it is right in the tradition:

His horse stepped into one of them holes and both went down before the stampede … after that, orders were given to sing when you were running with a stampede, so that others could know where you were as long as they heard you singing, and if they didn't hear you they would figure that something had happened. After a while this came to be a custom on the range. …²

Stampedes did happen while working cattle, of course, but anyone who has had any experience with sound must doubt the efficacy of singing to identify your position while running with a herd. In the first place, riding at full gallop in the dead of night over rough ground leaves little breath or time for yodelling long verses; secondly, a Caruso would find it next to impossible to make himself heard over the thunder of four thousand hooves. Having once tried to yell across a running bunch of fifty head, I refuse to contemplate the task of singing “The Dying Cowboy” under even worse conditions. Maybe Teddy Blue meant “sing out”; it is possible to hear the piercing cowboy yell at quite a distance. Singing, however, won't work.

The point to be made is this; here is at least one cowboy hard at work romanticizing the cowboy song, making of it—and of himself—something larger than life. It becomes possible, then, to say that the cowboy song, no matter what its source, may in at least some instances be the result of both internal and external delusions about cowboy life—internal in the person of the self‐conceit of the cowboy himself, and external in the person of the popular collectors, who from John Lomax to Chauncey Moore accept a kind of generic image of the cowboy—Gary Cooper as The Virginian. Among the collectors, it is there in Carl Sandburg, whose romantic vision of the cowboy has elsewhere been adequately noted. It is there in Margaret Larkin, who in an otherwise gritty collection describes a totally unjustified cowboy singing around his campfire, or, when he wasn't employed with guitar and voice, being the quiet, laconic, and chivalrous hero of the Western movie.³ And finally, there is John Lomax himself, perpetuating the transcendental assumptions which always seem to trail the wilderness hero: “The big, free, open life he lived near the Nature's breast taught him simplicity, calm, directness … [there is] an American quality about [even his] profanity and vulgarity that pleases rather than repulses. …”⁴

Indeed, it is the Lomaxes, father and son, who have been most influential in perpetuating this sentimental image in the cowboy song, largely because of their uncritical acceptance of the anonymous source as sufficient proof of a song's authenticity, frequently without any demonstrated proof of the origin of the song as cowboy or of the cultural extent of it. Yet the Lomax collections do contain a much smaller group of songs whose sources are attested to, and these offer a somewhat different picture of their authenticity. If these materials are to be believed—and by any test of reliability they are safer—the sort of person who wrote the “cowboy” song bore a distinctly different relationship to the cowboy culture—if there was one—than did the cowboy himself.

Lomax himself admits the possibility:

Many book‐learnt folklorists have recently taken to saying … that most so‐called cowboy songs were the work of educated poets or were mere imitations of popular songs. This position stems from such discoveries as the following: “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” is a parody of (though I should say an improvement on) the English “Bury Me Not in the Deep, Deep Sea;” a frontier minister composed “Roll on, Little Dogies;” the cowboys sang “Lorena” and other hit songs of the period; many cowboy songs are reworkings of older folk ballads.⁵

Add to this list such popular discoveries of Lomax as “Home on the Range,” thought to be folk song until it was discovered that two Kansas homesteaders had written it in a fit of homesickness, or “The Cowboy's Dream,” very popular but written by a “cowboy poet” supposedly hiding out in Clay County, Texas—a very romantic thing to do—and one begins to wonder what, if anything, many of the songs really have to do with the cowboy.

One thing seems certain: most songs whose authorship is traceable are the products of minds which, if not professionally musical, are much more conscious of music and its popular themes than the average cowboy. Even so universally known a song as “Little Joe, the Wrangler” becomes, once its author (Jack Thorp) is known, much more a deliberate construction of a romantically viewed image than a song arising out of the mind and experience of that unlettered hired hand, the cowboy. Indeed, if composers of many of the best known songs have any cultural traits at all, they are much more akin to other sentimental song writers of the late 1800's—or to their comrades the dime‐novelists—than they are to the wandering cowhand. They not only possess consciously learned musical skills, but are also professional practitioners of them.

Most cowboy song collections, unfortunately, fail to distinguish between professionally composed songs and those which might be more authentically range‐bred. Where John Lomax, for instance, tells of learning “Whoopee, Ti‐yo, Git Along, Little Dogies” from a “gypsy minstrel and her husband”—⁶ people whose sources are still unclear, but who are clearly using such a song as professional entertainment—other collectors either frankly acknowledge having borrowed the song from Lomax (as does Chauncey Moore)⁷ or call it a “trail‐song” (Margaret Larkin) learned from “the champion bulldogger of the Southwest”⁸—who, with his wife, is also part of a piano‐fiddle team, semi‐professional at best. Carl Sandburg, without documenting any of his statements, claims the song is “plainly of Irish origin”⁹ (and, if so, therefore extra‐indigenous) and gives it his usual romantic treatment: It “also has the smell of saddle leather and long stretches of level prairie.”

Of the songs whose authorship is more clearly traceable, a good example is “When the Work's All Done this Fall,”—also a frequently reprinted cowboy song. Lomax credits it to the Miles City, Montana, Stock‐Grower's Journal, in 1893 (a trifle after the hey‐day of the cowboy) with a specific author: D. J. White.¹⁰ Of the other songbooks examined, only Carl Sandburg lists a source, which is so obviously commercial as to make cowboy‐song‐collecting look ridiculous: a character named “Radio Mack”¹¹ of San Francisco. One is led to the inescapable conclusion that not only are there a great many unreal cowboy songs but that there are also a great many non‐cowboy authors of them.

Internal analysis of the songs themselves supports the idea. Unfamiliar with musical analysis, I am limited to the more familiar areas of versification and linguistics. But even the simplest review of verse structure and vocabulary indicates a far more sophisticated creation in many cowboy songs than the forty dollar a month working cowhand could ever have had time and training for. Metrically, many of the songs are intricate, except in rare instances, such as “The Old Chisholm Trail.” “Little Joe, the Wrangler,” for instance, is in near‐perfect Alexandrines (iambic hexameter), the metric used most successfully by Alexander Pope because it fit his style, but since fallen into disuse because it lies beyond the more natural and shorter rhythms of most English verse. “The Pecos Puncher,” chosen at random, is a complex use of alternate iambs and anapests in strict tetrametric order: * / ** / * / ** /. “I wear the high heels, also the white hat; I ride the Myers saddle, my chaps are the best.” In addition, many songs contain words which simply are not liable to appear in any but sophisticated vocabularies. Thorndike and Lorge's Teacher's Word Book, for instance, tables the frequency with which words appear in written English. “Exceeding,” for example, used in “Young Charlotte,” appears seven times per million words. “Adornment,” in “The Cowboy's Dance Song,” appears on an average of three times per million words. “Enshrouded,” or its source, “shroud,” appears no more than nine times per million words, and “blandishments,” as used in “Westward Ho,” no more than once. Obviously, these words not only do appear in these “cowboy” songs but had frequent literary use in the popular 19th century novel; the point to be made, however, is that if it is assumed that vocabulary is positively correlated with both educative and creative levels, such rarely‐found words must appear in the songs, as they do in the novel, because of influences far different from those possible in the generally illiterate, badly‐educated average cowhand. One is more convinced when he discovers such a supposedly indigenous song as the (bronc) “Peeler's Lament” uses as its dirge refrain the sestet of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous sonnet, “How do I Love Thee?” from Sonnets from the Portuguese (London, 1950).

I come back inevitably to my own background as a Montanan growing up in an admittedly less primitive ranch country in the 1930's, but one in which the cowboy still followed his trade and people still found occasion to use music. Like John Lomax, I am amazed to remember the indifference of local people—some of whom, like Teddy Blue Abbott, had experienced the frontier era—to indigenous songs. In these people's minds, schoolteachers and musicians wrote songs, like “On My Old Montana Claim,” sung to the tune of “The Old Summer Time.” But it was written for a homesteader's celebration, and it was produced by a graduate of Mankato State Normal School. The people I knew—and I played the trumpet with a cowtown dance band while I was in high school—played and sang the commercial tunes from the radio or sheet music: “South of the Border,” “Mexicali Rose,” and even “Deep Purple.” We got five dollars a night for doing so. Some of these musicians were also working cowboys, but like “the champion bulldogger” they were special. They could play an instrument—and sing, after a fashion. And they were rare—rare enough to make money entertaining others.

In all my life, working summers on ranches, knowing cowboys personally, I have never seen cowboys singing around the campfire, or anyone but the specially‐suited, guitar‐playing Western specialist and professional singing cowboy songs—his repertoire usually that of the most sentimental ballads from the most popular “collections.” I cannot, even at that, categorically deny the existence of such songs in the nineteenth century, or that they were known to cowboys. I am only suggesting that most of them appeared and were sung in a situation much more analogous to twentieth‐century popular song production than has been demonstrated—written by self‐conscious artists, first appearing probably in places of entertainment like the ubiquitous honkey‐tonk, learned and sung by the more musical cowboy as a decoration, not a necessity, for his daily occupation, and, like too many romantic creations of the Western myth, only apparently reflecting a true picture of the cowboy and his times. Only a few—a very few—by their simplicity, their roughness, the characteristics which made it possible for even the most ordinary cowboy to use and to add to them—may really be called “authentic” in their reflection of cowboy life or cowboy mores, or “indigenous” in that they have apparently been created by actual cowboys. Of these the most famous—and perhaps the most authentic—is “The Old Chisholm Trail,” with its simple couplets, its uncomplicated tune, its reiterated refrain, and its earthy vulgarity, apparent even in the bowdlerized versions printed in folk song anthologies (anyone who has been in the army, for instance, will be able to substitute the noun in the verse which goes “Woke up in the morning on the old Chisholm Trail / Rope in my hand and a steer by the tail”). But such songs are all too rare. Except for those lyrics whose authenticity is reflected in a sort of matter‐of‐fact grimness and a pervasive coarseness, other “cowboy” songs usually show two external influences: (1) the commercial stereotypes of the conventional nineteenth century song; (2) the sometimes strained retention of older folk traditions, in songs which, like “The Streets of Laredo,” are modifications from earlier cultures—both strains marred by the influence of sentimental Victorianism.

Of the two, the first predominates and seems more closely parallel to the contemporary traditions of the Western novel. Judged by the standard criteria—glorification of home and mother, dying repentance, the influence of a good woman, outworn “poetic” diction, plus heroic virtue and the salving effects of nature—some sixty of the songs in John Lomax's widely borrowed collection fall into this genre. When, in addition, one eliminates those songs which are clearly extra‐cultural—older ballads restrung for the range, songs of the Mexican and Civil Wars, other songs which make no reference to the cowboy—one not only deletes another forty‐five songs or so from the collection but most of its sentimentality, the fifty‐odd remaining songs presenting a singularly unromantic, unheroic picture of the cowboy—drinking his loneliness away, dying (innumerable times) under a stampede, cursing weather, alkali, working conditions, and the solitary life. In other collections, too, it is a rare thing indeed to find an editor perceptive enough to stick to his knowledge of the necessary Western actualities and eliminate those songs that don't square with it. Most, indeed, borrow primarily from Lomax those same sentimental or extra‐cultural songs. Even Jack Thorp's archetypal anthology¹² is marred by his insertion of his own “Little Joe, the Wrangler” in a collection which is otherwise mostly comprised of those rare, crude, and authentic artifacts which, like “The Old Chisholm Trail,” are songs the cowboy seems capable of.

The inescapable conclusion is that both the cowboy and the collector, deceived by an overwhelming Western myth, accepted into their repertoires a tremendous number of works by conscious, extra‐cultural artists whose chivalrous and Victorian description of the cowboy matched his own heroic self‐image but not the crude and unromantic facts of his actual existence. It is perhaps inevitable that collectors, accepting this image of himself to be true, should also have accepted as authentic a great many songs cast in that image. The literary historian, having noted the discrepancy between image and fact, need not feel so uncritically obliged.

Notes

1. Chauncey Moore, Ballads & Folk Songs of the Southwest (Norman, Oklahoma, 1964), p. 267.

2. E. C. Abbott, We Pointed Them North (New York, 1955), p. 37.

3. Margaret Larkin, Singing Cowboy (New York, 1963), see introduction, pp. 9‐18.

4. Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York, 1927), p. 258.

5. Alan Lomax, Folk Songs of North America (New York, 1960, p. 359.

6. John Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York, 1947), pp. 43‐45.

7. Moore, p. 291.

8. Larkin, p. 98.

9. Lomax, p. 415.

10. John Lomax and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York, 1938), p. 53.

11. Carl Sandburg, The American Song‐bag (New York, 1927), p. 260.

12. N. Howard (Jack) Thorp, Songs of the Cowboy (New York, 1966), p. 28. Variants, commentary, notes and lexicon by Austin E. & Alta S. Fife.