Songs of the Cowboy: Adventures of a Ballad Hunter

by JOHN A. LOMAX

1

WHEN in 1908 a check for $500 came from Harvard University for my first year as a Sheldon Fellow, I was the happiest person in the world. Never before at one time had I owned so much money, money that brought me both honor and responsibility. I was entirely free to spend it in running down the words and music of cowboy songs. In a glow of anticipation I made plans to travel the following summer throughout the cattle country.

It proved a long and hard road that I started on, as I made my way, walking, on horseback, by buggy, by train and automobile — a tortuous journey that has since then wound a half-million miles into every part of the United States. Very few of my associates in the University of Texas expressed sympathy or took the project seriously. For them this crude product of the West had no interest, no value, no charm whatever. Governor Jim Ferguson quoted stanzas of my cowboy songs in political addresses to cheering crowds, and sneered at the University of Texas for having me on its faculty, just as he sneered at a teacher of zoology, asserting repeatedly that this professor was trying to make wool grow on the backs of armadillos and thus bring down the price of sheep! Both of us were sorry fools to him.

It was cowboy songs I most wished, in those early days, to round up and “close herd.” These I jotted down on a table in a saloon back room, scrawled on an envelope while squatting beside a campfire near a chuck wagon, or caught behind the scenes of a bronchobusting outfit or rodeo. To capture the cowboy music proved an almost impossible task. The cowboys would simply wave away the large horn I carried and refuse to sing into it. Not one song did I ever get from them except through the influence of generous amounts of whiskey, raw and straight from the bottle or jug. Once I was invited to speak at the Texas Cattlemen’s Convention in San Antonio. To advertise my undertaking, I attempted to sing some of the tunes I wished to record from the trail men. My poor efforts brought only derisive whoops. One belligerent cattleman arose and announced: “I have been singin’ them songs ever since I was a kid. Everybody knows them. Only a damn fool would spend his time tryin’ to set ‘em down. I move we adjourn.” And adjourn they did, to a convenient bar.

One night in the back room of the White Elephant saloon in Fort Worth, where I had cornered a bunch of Ediphone-shy cowboy singers, a cowboy said to the crowd: “I told the professor [that’s what they jokingly called me] that the Old Chisholm Trail song was as long as the trail from Texas to Montana. I can sing eighty-nine verses myself. Some of the verses would burn up his old horn, and anyhow, I’m not goin’ to poke my face up to his blamed old horn and sing. The tune ain’t much nohow.” The tune wasn’t much — but it suited the cowboy’s work. He could sing it when he went dashing out to turn a runaway steer back to the herd: —

And he could sing it with a roaring chorus as the men sat about the campfire during the long winter evenings.

“Back in the seventies,” said another cowboy in the crowd, “we sang ‘The Old Chisholm Trail’ all the way from San Antonio to Dodge City. There was never a day that someone did not build a new verse.” There is another “Chisholm Trail” tune — a quiet, jig-joggy tune — when a fellow was riding alone, scouting for drifting cattle, or riding the “line” through lonely stretches of country. I finally persuaded one of the boys to sing it. But not for my recording machine. I learned the tune and later recorded it myself for the Folk Song Archive in the Library of Congress.

2

OUT on a busy corner near the cattle pens of the Fort Worth stockyards I had come upon a blind old man twanging his guitar while he sang doleful ditties and listened for the ring of quarters in his tin cup.

“I don’t know any cowboy songs,” he explained to me. “But lead me home to lunch; my wife can sing you a bookful.”

The old man shuffled along beside me, clasping his guitar as I guided him over the rough places in our path. We were headed for the trees that fringed the West Fork of the Trinity River near Fort Worth. Often I stumbled, for I was carrying the heavy Edison machine.

We found the blind singer’s wife out behind a covered truck, a forerunner of the trailer, seated in front of a gaily-colored tent. She wore a gypsy costume of rich brocade. She had used paint and powder with skillful discretion on a face naturally comely. While I chatted with her, the old man disappeared into the tent. In a few minutes out he came. Gone were the round, humped shoulders, the while hair, the shambling gait, the tottering figure — and the colored glasses! Before me stood a young, handsome, dark-eyed man, alert and athletic. He was a perfect faker.

“We do teamwork here. My wife shakes down the saps who like to hold her hand while she reads their fortunes in the stars. All the self-righteous fools go away from my tin cup happy, marking down one more good deed on their passports to Heaven. We aim to please our customers, and I think we do.” Thus the faker rambled on while a smiling Negro man served delicious food and a bottle of wine. Later on, through the long Texas afternoon, amid the cheerful talk, the fortuneteller sang the songs of the road. She and her family for generations had lived as gypsies.

“This lady,” said the faker, “who has joined her fortunes with mine, travels with me now from Miami, Florida, to San Diego, California. We belong to that fringe of society which takes life the easiest way. We toil not, neither do we spin.” Raising a tent flap he showed me rich purple hangings, thick Persian rugs, a divan spread with soft silken covers — amazing luxury.

“With our burros, Abednego and Sennacherib, to pull our covered wagon, we travel as we like. Our rackets roll in the money.”

He lay flat on his back on the mesquite grass, puffing a cigar as he gazed at the white patches of clouds that swept across the deep-blue Texas sky. I glanced curiously at Abednego and Sennacherib as they munched their alfalfa. They seemed as old as the pyramids and as solemn as a pair of Aztec idols — which they, indeed, resembled. They seemed to talk to each other with abundant, constantly moving ears, fastened loosely to their great bony heads. And here, close by, sat the fake gypsy lady, dressed like a princess, strumming her guitar and singing the songs that she had picked up in her wanderings.

She scorned the clumsy horn fastened to my recording machine, but I caught a few of the tunes. I remember that she sang me the first blues that I ever heard, moving me almost to tears, and a pathetic ballad of a factory girl who got splinters in her toes. Many and many another song she sang that unhappily is gone with the Texas wind. Then came four stanzas and the refrain: —

“To me,” she said, “that’s the loveliest of all cowboy songs. Like others, its rhythm comes from the movement of a horse. It is not the roisterous, hell-for-leather, wild gallop of ‘The Old Chisholm Trail,’ nor the slow easy canter of ‘Good-bye, Old Paint.’ You mustn’t frighten the dogies. They get nervous in crowds. Lope around them gently in the darkness as you sing about punching them along to their new home in Wyoming. They’ll sleep the night through and never have a bad dream.”

After the refrain she would give the night herding yodel of the cowboy, born of the vast melancholy of the plains; a yodel to quiet a herd of restless cattle in the deep darkness of a rainy night, when far-off flashes of lightning and the rumble of distant thunder meant danger. While the cattle milled around and refused to lie down, close to the fringe of the circle of moving animals rode the cowboys giving this wordless cry to the cattle, like the plea of a lonesome lobo wolf calling for his mate, like the croon of a mother trying to quiet a restless babe in the long watches of the night, like the soft moo of a cow wooing her young offspring from its hiding place to come for its milk. “Quiet, cattle, quiet. Darkness is everywhere, but we, your friends, are near. Lie down, little dogies, lie down.” The yodel was persuasive, far-reaching. Even in its high notes it was soothing and tender.

As the gypsy woman, swayed by the beauty of her notes, yodeled on, the leaves of the overhanging cottonwood trees fluttered noiselessly, the katydids in the branches stopped their song and seemed to listen. In all our world there was no other sound save that beautiful voice imploring all little dogies to “lay still, little dogies, lay still.”

3

I READ through the files of Texas newspapers that printed columns of old songs, and I bedeviled librarians for possible buried treasures in frontier chronicles. In a secondhand bookstore in San Antonio I found a battered copy of Johnson’s New Comic Songs with a San Francisco date line of 1863. Along with the old favorites “Gentle Annie” and “Nellie Gray,” I came on the words of “Poker Jim,” “The Miner’s Song,” “The Dying Californian,” and other song products of the days of forty-nine.

Some months afterward I asked the Librarian of the University of California at Berkeley if he knew of other pamphlets of early frontier songs. He had none catalogued. He then took me to the Bancroft Library and left me to rummage in some habitually locked-up cases. I came on a stack of dog-eared, paper-backed pamphlets tied together with an ancient cotton string. Though I lifted out the pile with care, the cotton string crumbled in my fingers. There they were — not a complete file of the “20,000 song books” advertised by D. E. Appleton & Co., San Francisco, but a choice selection of early “California Songsters”: Ben Cotton’s Songster, The Sally Come Up Songster, Put’s Original California Songster, Put’s Golden Songster, and many another. I discovered that “Old Put” and a group of men singers went from gold camp to gold camp in the early fifties and sang to the miners. When they ran out of songs Old Put and his like made up songs describing the life of a mining town, telling how the Forty-niners got to California and sometimes how they got back East. They were rough and crude creations, but among them I turned up “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and “The Days of Forty-nine,” and afterward also discovered the tunes to which they were sung: —

Betsy and her man lived in the times and seasons of the days of forty-nine:—

Uncovering these two songs repaid me for the long trip from Texas.

Tom Hight, a Texas trail-driver, and I spent two happy days together recording songs in an Oklahoma City hotel. Tom was made happier, as I am sure I was, by the added presence of two quart bottles of rye which he consulted frequently between songs. Tom knew more cowboy melodies than any other person I have ever found. He gave me fifty.

“Ever since I was a boy,” said Tom, “I have been a singing fool. I could sing down any man in our cow camp in the Panhandle. When the fellers backed me against the neighboring camp, I won. They challenged the whole damn Panhandle. The champeens of each camp met at a central point, and we lifted up our heads like a pack of coyotes, only we lifted ’em one at a time. The rules was that each man was to sing in turn, one after the other, round and round. The man that sung the last, song, he won the prize. It took us mighty near all night to get sung out. The other feller couldn’t sing no more, because he didn’t know no more songs. But I was ready with the last one and had more roped and ready. Of course you couldn’t use no books and no writing. I was mighty proud of being the champeen singer of the Texas Panhandle. My cowboy friends gave a pair of silver-mounted spurs for a prize with my name engraved on them.”

Twenty-five years after the Oklahoma singing bee Tom Hight wrote to me from California:—

The first contest I can remember having was on a nice tittle creek, near old Bever City (about five miles) in the old neutral strip, or No Man’s Land, just north of the Texas Panhandle. We was holding 2500 head of cattle there on good grass and water and two men rode up and asked to stop overnight with us and in those days everybody was welcome. So they stayed three nights and two days until the horses rested up, for they was rode down when they came and they had two sixshooters and Winchester each and wore good cloths, shop-made boots and Stetson hats and was 25 or 30 years old and never both slept at once. So the second evening while sitting around camp something was said about singing and one of them said he would sing song wdth anyone. So the boss said that he had a kid that he would sing against him. I was 20 years old.

So after supper we hookes up. The others stood my guard from 8 to 9 and we sang song until about 10 P.M. Then he said, “Kid, I have sang all I know.” Then the boys gave the cheers — there was no wager but I got a thrill out of it. So they saddled up the third morning and bid us the time of day, rode off. So in a few days we heard the Coffeyville Kansas Bank had been robbed and we all thought them a part of the ones. We never asked their names, as that wasn’t often done those days. I can’t remember any of the songs either he or I sang, as that was 50 years ago.

The name of the boys was Ralph Church (the boss), Jack Leonard and Shorty Allen, Les Laverty, Bell Fillops, Charley Straw, Billie Hill, and John Laverty, the cook.

I sang against a fellow in Weatherford, Texas, in a wagon yard. His name was Ben Green, his and my friends done the matching of it for a quart of whiskey. So we had quite a jolly time, about 30 men, and they sure got a kick out of it. I beet him in about 3 hours. He said he had never been beet before.

The last letter came from Tom Hight when he was more than eighty years old. He spoke of riding into the sunset, his closing words being: “Farewell, until we rattle our hocks on the other side.”

4

AMONG my students in the A. and M. College of Texas was a young fellow from Denison, Texas, by the name of Harry Stephens. Harry had worked cattle in New Mexico and Arizona for three or four years; and he brought with him to college a handsome saddle, saddle blanket, bridle, spurs, and other equipment. His saddle was ornamented with silver. He didn’t like the college uniform and he wasn’t much interested in English literature, but he warmed up when I mentioned cowboy songs. He would stay after class and recite and sing songs to me. Now and then he would drift down to my home on Sunday and lean over the fence and sing a song to attract my attention. I never could get him farther than the gate.

Early in the spring, when the world was turning green again, Harry called on me one morning just as the bugle was blowing for the first, class period. I went out to the gate on which he leaned. “Well, Professor,” he said, “grass is rising — and I got to move on. I’m lonesome. I want to hear the wolves howl and the owls hoot.” Twenty years went by before I saw Harry again. Meanwhile he sent me Western songs. Some I’m sure he made up; some he “doctored”; some he had taken down from the singing of others. One day I received a letter from him. He was on a ranch in southern Idaho. Enclosed were the words of what I consider the most beautiful cowboy poem in the language. The opening stanza runs: —

Years afterward, a young woman at Flagstaff, Arizona, after one of my folk-song talks, came up and said that she knew Harry Stephens, who was then in a hospital some hundred miles away as a result of a serious accident bulldogging steers. But it was a long time before our paths crossed again.

During one of my early folk-song hunting trips to San Antonio, I looked up the proprietor of the locally famous Buckhorn saloon. He was a German with a penchant for collecting the horns of wild animals. The horns, literally thousands in number, festooned the walls of his place of business, even to the gambling quarters in behind the front room where drinks were shoved across an elaborately carved bar.

As I sipped a glass of beer, I noticed a stack of printed eight-inch slips, titled “Hell in Texas.” I read one through and was reminded that a Texas newspaper once claimed that General William Tecumseh Sherman was reputed to have written the song as a faithful picture of what he had suffered when, as a young officer, he was stationed on the Texas frontier. On leaving Texas, General Sherman, again according to legend, had said that if he owned both Texas and Hell he would rent out Texas and live in Hell. Whereupon a Texan retorted: “Well, damn a man who won’t stand up for his own country!”

In the song Texas is described as a special creation of the Devil: —

My pleasure in this modern broadside won the attention of the German saloonkeeper. “I’ve already given away 100,000 copies of the Hell in Texas song,” he told me. Then he directed me to another drink dispenser, a Negro, who ran a place down near the Southern Pacific depot, out in a scrubby mesquite grove.

“He was a trail cook for years,” declared my friend, “and he knows a world of cowboy songs.”

That afternoon I found my man back behind his saloon shack with his hat drawn down over his eyes, his head tilted back against a mesquite tree. When I shook him awake and told him what I wanted, he muttered, “I’se drunk, I’se drunk. Come back tomorrow and I’ll sing for you.” I spent all the next day under the mesquites back of the saloon with this Negro. Among the songs he sang was “ Home on the Range.” From the record I made that day in 1908, down in the Negro red-light district (they used stolen red switch lanterns to advertise their trade), Henry Leberman, a blind teacher of music in the Austin State School for the Blind, a few weeks afterward, set down the music which, touched up here and there, has since won a high place as a typical Western folk tune.

The original cylindrical record of the song has crumbled into dust, but the music survives. First printed in Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads in 1910, the basic melody which the Negro saloonkeeper gave me runs through the many sheet-music versions of the song that have since been published. In 1925 Carl Fischer published for Oscar J. Fox, a composer of San Antonio, Texas, the first sheet-music version. Lawrence Tibbett and John Charles Thomas soon thereafter included it in their concert programs. For a time it became the number one tune on the radio.

The story goes that on the night that Franklin D. Roosevelt was first elected to the Presidency, New York reporters gathered on his doorstep and sang “Home on the Range.” At a White House press conference, the President afterward called it his favorite song, and at Warm Springs, Georgia, the custom grew of using the song to welcome his visit.

In 1934 a suit for a cool half-million dollars for alleged infringement of copyright, brought by a couple of Arizona claimants, put “Home on the Range” in the headlines. A resourceful New York lawyer found that, in 1873, two lonely Kansas claimowners got together and composed the song. From one dugout came the words; from another dugout the music. Fortunately it was printed that same year in the Smith County Pioneer. Faced with these facts, the pseudo authors withdrew their suit. The National Broadcasting Company and others breathed easily again. A contributor who helped trace the origin of the song was W. W. McGilvrey of Thief River Falls, Minnesota. In the song, “the buffalo roam,” “the deer and the antelope play,” “the wild curlews scream,” and

Replying to a request for information about the song, the Thief River Falls man addressed a letter to “Fiddlin’ Joe and all the rest of the Wild West Family” in which he furnished helpful facts. As a postscript he wrote: “I might add that at that time there was antelope [in Kansas] in plentiful numbers, also the curlew was there, but not nary a dang swan! Buffalo had been gone about three years.”

Writing to the San Francisco Chronicle from Redwood City, California, February 21, 1938, Mrs. S. Dimick said: “I read an obituary of Reverend Crandell, a Methodist Minister in Oregon, which said that he was the author of both the words and the music of ‘Home on the Range.’ Anyone familiar with the old church song ‘Home of the Soul’ will recognize quite a similarity to that tune.” Mrs. Sidney Cawell and others have recently written me that Vance Randolph told them that swans were common in Kansas in early days.

Meanwhile, in the Dallas (Texas) Morning News for May 24, 1940, William L. White, of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette wrote from Bucharest of a trip through the Balkans: “. . . the little bars are particularly nice because of their music. And they all know American songs. . . . And the nicest thing of all is that every one of them knows ‘Home on the Range’ and for the equivalent of one United States quarter in the local money, you can get them to play it over and over during the evening while you sprawl back in the soft leather cushions and drink beer and think about Kansas, or your lost youth, or some of the girls you used to know. . . .”

I wonder if Mr. White knew that “Home on the Range” got its start in Kansas.

5

LATE at night, hungry and tired, I leaned out of the car window as the train came into Deming, New Mexico, over the dusty route of the Southern Pacific railroad from El Paso, Texas. My friend Roy Bedichek met me at the train steps with his friendly Airedale dog, Hobo.

“Come over to the back room of the X-10-U-8 saloon,” said Bedi. “They serve good steaks there and you may hear some singing.”

As we ate, an impromptu quartet, made up of the bartender, a hobo graduate of Oxford University, a freight brakeman just off his run from Lordsburg, and a cowboy from the Diamond A (Hearst) Ranch, sang “Casey Jones” with so many sad quavers that the dog Hobo howled mournfully as the song ended. Too perfect for a real ballad, I thought, though I have since found out that a Negro roundhouse worker at Canton, Mississippi, started the song on its way, when he found blood on the engine that killed Casey Jones.

Through the Diamond A cowboy I got an invitation to visit the Hearst Ranch about halfway between Deming and Silver City, where Billy the Kid reputedly added several notches to the handle of his Colt revolver. The next morning I rode northward out of Deming on a hired livery-stable horse. On the pommel of my saddle I balanced the fiftypound recording machine, while tied up in a slicker behind the cantle of the saddle was the recording horn. No stranger-looking outfit, perhaps, had ever gone over that trail.

The Diamond A Ranch, at that time still a part of the estate of Senator George Hearst, father of the newspaper publisher, covered a large section of that part of New Mexico. The Southern Pacific railroad split it in halves. My business took me to the North Section. Darkness fell before my plodding steed stood at the front gate from which a long path led to a low, rambling dwelling house. I shouted, “Hello!” A man came to the door and answered, “Light, stranger, and look at your saddle.” Then I felt at home, even at the Hearst headquarters.

After supper, my host drove me in a buggy behind two big, long-legged, fast-moving horses several miles away to where a bunch of cowboys, camped in the open, had their campfire in a gully. The roaring wind sent streams of sparks across the open plains as the men sat about the fire in cowboy fashion with their backs to the blast. Here again I met my cowboy of the night before, Garland Hodges, a genial, friendly chap. Several men sang for me that night.

After a time the foreman said to one of the boys, “Jim, you old hornswoggling cadaver of a pinto, say your piece for us, and put on all the tremolos. I’m pining for home and mother.” And big Jim Swanson, still wearing his spurs, and marking the rhythm of the verses by waving his quirt, bowing first to his eager audience, recited “The Cowboy’s Ruminations”: —

Then Garland remembered a short piece which he had learned from a cowboy in Silver City: —

Years afterward, as a train took me into Concord, New Hampshire, where I was to lecture to the boys of St. Paul’s School, I saw from the car window a big sign over a large manufacturing plant. I read, “Concord Ironworks.” On inquiry I found that for many years this company had built the old stagecoaches (and the chains to pull them) that were famous in early Western life. Thus I found out about the puzzling words “Concord chains” Garland Hodges sang for me that windy night in New Mexico.

To protect me from the wind, he had curled his body in a half circle, I on the inside, while I scribbled as the songs went on. The flames of the fire, blown almost parallel to the ground, gave but feeble light, though I managed to get down all the words.

In the summer of 1910, Boothe Merrill, a college friend, gave me the dance song, “Good-bye Old Paint.” Unexpectedly and joyously, one night we faced each other at the entrance of a noisy Cheyenne saloon. Boothe was coming out one swinging door as I was going in through the other. We grasped hands and chanted together the last verse of our college song, afterward sung by the Texans at Corregidor, “The Eyes of Texas.”

Boothe was astounded to see me going into a saloon, and I was amazed to see him coming out. Then both doors swung inward and we found a quiet room at the back end of the place. I was running down cowboy songs and recording them; Boothe was on a vacation from his duties as prosecuting attorney for a county in western Oklahoma.

“Out in my country,” said Boothe, “we do not dance ‘Home Sweet Home’ for the last waltz at a cowboy breakdown; instead we stop the music and all sing and dance, to slow waltz time, ‘Good-bye, Old Paint.’ ” He wouldn’t let me “can” his voice, but he did sing the tune over and over again until I was able to carry it in my head back to Texas. Afterward I heard the same song at a rollicking “play-party” near Orville Bullington’s ranch in Wheeler County, Texas. To avoid trouble with the churches, the boys and girls sing songs of dance music instead of dancing to the fiddle.

To the stanzas sung to me by Boothe Merrill in Wyoming have been added other stanzas, all in loving tribute to a cow pony called Old Paint. A “paint” horse is a spotted horse, the favorite colors being a mixture of white and black, or white and bay. Such a horse in the “string” of a cowboy was usually reserved for his Sunday riding mount. Sometimes he was called a calico horse, “for to go to see my calico gal with a calico dress on,” as one cowboy remarked.

The fact that a paint horse was a bit tougher, perhaps more given to pitching when first saddled, only increased his attractiveness to the fortunate youth who claimed him. Happy the lover if Old Paint pitched a “fence-row” from his sweetheart’s door while she waved a happy farewell from her front porch. For her lover could ride, and tomorrow night were they not to dance together at a play-party while they sang with the other dancers?