The Southwestern Cowboy Songs and the English and Scottish Popular Ballads
by Louise Pound
Modern Philology, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Oct., 1913), pp. 195-207
THE SOUTHWESTERN COWBOY SONGS AND THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS
Several writers recently have found analogy between the conditions attending the growth of cowboy songs in isolated communities in the Southwest, and the conditions under which arose the English and Scottish popular ballads-those problematic pieces which form so special a chapter in the history of English poetry. Mr. Lomax, the chief collector of southwestern folk songs,[1] notes, when speaking of western communities, how "illiterate people and people cut off from newspapers and books, isolated and lonelythrown back on primal resources for entertainment and for the expression of emotion-utter themselves through somewhat the same character of songs as did their forefathers of perhaps a thousand years ago."
Professor Barrett Wendell[2] suggests that it is possible to trace in this group of American ballads "the precise manner in which songs and cycles of songs-obviously analogous to those surviving from older and antique times-have come into being. The facts which are still available concerning the ballads of our own Southwest are such as should go far to prove, or to disprove,
many of the theories advanced concerning the laws of literature as evinced in the ballads of the Old World."
Ex-President Roosevelt affirms in a personal letter to Mr. Lomax[3] that "there is something very curious in the reproduction here on this new continent of essentially the conditions of ballad-growth which obtained in mediaeval England."
The parallel felt by these writers is worked out, with more specific detail and greater definiteness, by Professor W. W. Lawrence, in a passage prefixed to a discussion of the ballads of Robin Hood:[4]
These men, living together on the solitary ranches of Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico, have been accustomed to entertain each other after the day's work is done by singing songs, some of which have been familiar to them from boyhood, others of which they have actually composed themselves. .... These cowboy ballads are not the expression of individuals but of the whole company which listens to them, and they are, in a very real sense, the work of other men than the author. ....
The author counts for nothing, it will be observed; his name is generallyn ot remembered, and what he invents is as characteristic o f his comrades as of himself. Here we have literature which is a perfect index of the social ideals of the
body of men among whom it is composed, literature which makes no pretense to literary form or to the disclosure of the emotions of any one man as
distinguished from his fellows. There are few communities of the present
day which are as closely united in common aims and sympathies as these
bands of Westernc owboys,h encet here are few opportunitiesf or the production
of verse which is as truly the expression of universal emotion as are
these songs.
Such Western ranches reproduce almost perfectly the conditions under
which the English popular ballads were composed. ..
It is obvious from these passages that their writers find a real
parallel between the conditions leading to the growth in our own
time, in certain homogeneous communities of the Southwest, of
fugitive folk pieces like those gathered by Mr. Lomax, and the
conditions responsible for the rise in the Middle Ages of the traditional
ballads of England and Scotland. For the student of both
folk-lore and literature, the parallel so clearly set forth in the
paragraphs last quoted has strong interest; and its possibilities
of instructiveness are warrant for making it the basis for a brief
special examination. Wherein does it hold ? How far is it to be
pushed? What, if anything, is indicated concerning the Old World
pieces by their New World analogues? Of the two leading schools
of thought concerning the genesis of the English and Scottish ballads,
that which may be designated the "Harvard school" emphasizes
the idea of real communal composition, as by a collective village
community, and adheres to a definition by origins for genuine popular
ballads; that which may be called the English school' defines by
destination and style. For the mass of traditional English and
Scottish folk-ballads it finds necessary the hypothesis of a higher
I See chiefly W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry, I (1895); G. G. Smith,
The Transition Period, vi (1900); W. P. Ker, On the History of the Ballads, 1100-1500
(1910); and T. F. Henderson, Scottish Vernacular Literature (1898); Introduction to
Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1902); and The Ballad in Literature (1912).
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COWBOY SONGS AND POPULAR BALLADS 3
origin than spontaneous popular collaboration. Which, if either,
of these schools may find support in the parallel under discussion;
if it be true, as Professor Wendell suggests, that the facts concerning
western songs may "go far to prove, or to disprove, many of the
theories advanced concerning the laws of literature as evinced in
the ballads of the Old World", in which direction, if either, is the
student of English balladry led ?
Let us first examine, for the sake of the generalizations to be
made, the subject-matter of the American pieces, and their style.
A certain percentage of the songs in the collection of Mr. Lomax
are perhaps genuine cowboy pieces, approached from almost any point
of view. Those which are most typical are related very closely to
the life of the communities which originated and preserved them.
Some of these, the editor tells us, the singers themselves composed.
There are songs dealing with the life of the ranch, of the trail, songs
of stampedes, of the barroom; but chiefly they deal with cattle and
the cowboys who have them in charge. There are a few passing
references to their "bosses"; but songs relating to these, or to the
ranch-owners, songs of the lives of their employers and their families,
do not appear. A few preserve the style of the ultra-sentimental
or "flowery" period of American verse,1 with doubtfully westernized
setting, a few are ascribed to personal authors,2 and some are plainly
built on or out of well-known songs;3 but these are not wholly
typical. Of what may be termed the real cowboy pieces, the following
verses, cited as representative by Professor Lawrence also, will
give a good idea:
I'm a rowdy cowboy just off the stormy plains,
My trade is girting saddles and pulling bridle reins,
Oh, I can tip the lasso, it is with graceful ease;
I rope a streak of lightning, and ride it where I please.
My bosses they all like me, they say I am hard to beat;
1 "By Markentura's Flowery Marge," p. 224; or the story of Amanda and Young
Albon, p. 271.
2 "Night-Herding Song," p. 324; or "The Metis Song of the Buffalo Hunters,"
p. 72.
" The Cowboy's Dream" (based on "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean"), p. 18;
or "The Railroad Corral" (see Sir Walter Scott's "Bonny Dundee"), p. 318. "The
Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim," p. 187, widely known in the Mid-West, is an
adaptation, it seems to the present writer, of the once very popular "The Little Old Log
Cabin in the Lane."
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4 LOUISE POUND
I give them the bold stand off, you bet I have got the cheek.
I always work for wages, my pay I get in gold;
I am bound to follow the longhorn steer until I am too old.
Ci yi yip yip yip pe ya.
Or-
Come all you jolly cowboys that follow the bronco steer,
I'll sing to you a verse or two your spirits for to cheer;
It's all about a trip, a trip that I did undergo
On that crooked trail to Holbrook, in Arizona oh.
Or-
Bill driv the stage from Independence
Up to the Smokey Hill;
And everybody knowed him thar
As Independence Bill,-
Thar warn't no feller on the route
That driv with half the skill.
As might be foreseen, though picturesque and often forceful,
these pieces are crude and nearly formless, without literary quality
or individual touch.' Also they tend to be songs rather than ballads;
they are more likely to express collective or individual feeling than
to be verse narratives. There is an established manner, but it is
crude; real poetical quality they can hardly be said to have. The
Stoff is relatively unambitious and was found by the composers
close at hand. No doubt it is compositions of this nature to which
may fairly be ascribed the communal origin suggested by Mr. Lomax
and sketched out by Professor Lawrence. These might well have
found their origin in the improvisation of a community isolated and
homogeneous; and they well reflect the life, the tastes, the themes,
and song modes, of those among whom they are current. To reiterate,
they deal as a mass with the life and the interests of the same
class of people that originate them and sing them. And among
this class, it is tempting to add, the pieces so composed are likely
to die!
Suppose that we endeavor to distinguish, among the songs
collected by Mr. Lomax, those which have found widest diffusion
1 It is more than likely that even these compositions are built from well-known
songs, like those cited in the preceding footnote, i.e., are adaptations. Most of them
follow the model of stall ballads, or "Come all ye's," as they are sometimes designated.
Of course it would be only the framework, the suggestion that is so given; the rest would
be the work of some adapter, or, it may be, series of adapters.
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COWBOYS ONGSA ND POPULARB ALLADS 5
and greatest promise of permanence. They are not those which
may fairly be thought to have originated on southwestern ranches,
but rather those which may fairly be thought not to have originated
there. Currency and diffusion, a sort of permanence, have been
gained by a number of the better pieces; but they are pieces not
peculiar to the cowboys or to the Southwest; they deal rather with
outside life and topics. The very first, "0 bury me not on the
lone prairie," or "The Dying Cowboy," despite its title, is no communal
cowboy improvisation. It has been recovered from oral
tradition in Missouri, Kentucky, New England, Nebraska, and
elsewhere. It is built, as is well known, on a sea piece, accessible
in print,1 "0 bury me not in the deep, deep sea." The songs "Jesse
James," "The Death of Garfield," "The Days of Forty-Nine," "The
Texas Rangers," "The Boston Burglar," and others have been
recovered in many states of the Mid-West, East, and South.2 So
with "Young Charlotte," thought by Mr. Phillips Barry to have
been composed by a rural poet in Vermont, about two generations
ago.3 "The Dreary Black Hills," has been recovered in Missouri,
Nebraska, Wyoming, and elsewhere. A version of "Mississippi
Girls," localized to suit quite different conditions,4 is in the possession
of the writer. For songs of the cowboy type quoted from earlier
in this paper, a spontaneous origin on the trail may be a probable
explanation, but not for those of the type enumerated in the preceding
sentences. The latter are more likely to have drifted to than
from the Southwest.5 But be that as it may, it seems to be true that
the group which has achieved currency and permanence did not
1A text appears in Fulton and Trueblood's Choice Readings, Boston, 1883; but the
ascription of authorship there is probably not to be trusted.
2 Additional instances are "Fuller and Warren," "Jerry, Go Ile That Car," "The
Cowboy's Lament," "Macaffie's Confession," "The Little Old Sod Shanty," "The
Wars of Germany," "Fannie Moore," "Betsy from Pike," "Rosin the Bow."
3 "Native Balladry in America," Journal of American Folk-Lore, XXII, 365-73.
4 The Old World ballad " The Two Brothers" (Child, 49), in a version in the possession
of the writer--otherwise pretty faithful as regards narrative-seems from the
surprising "way out in Idaho" of its last line to be well on its way toward becoming a
western piece. A version of "Lord Randal" (Child, 12) recovered from railway camps
in Colorado, under the name "Johnny Randall," has already become such. See Modern
Language Notes, January, 1902.
5 The cowboys wandered into the Southwest from diverse regions and varying
cultural conditions; they must have brought with them differing conceptions and models
of verse, sung to diverse tunes. Mainly, however, their models would be of the stall or
street ballad type.
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6 LOUISE POUND
concern itself with the local and the special in cowboy life, but with
the general, i.e., with widely known and interesting events and
persons. Some, like the ballads of Jesse James and Cole Younger,
or of the death of Garfield, have or had a sort of nation-wide interest.
Others have some striking interest of situation or climax, or have
more sustained and "artistic" execution, as "Young Charlotte";
or they were perhaps floated into diffusion by special tunefulness.
Surely songs, or ballads proper, or both, are frequently improvised
even now in remote or isolated homogeneous communities, as they
were in greater degree in the past; but it does not seem that these
are the pieces most likely to persist and to find permanent transmission.
Behind these spontaneous and inevitably crude compositions
there is too little klan; not enough quality, poetic style,
"art," tunefulness perhaps, not enough universality of appeal.' It
takes pressure, strong impetus, to "float" a piece into real transmission
and diffusion. Even among the Texas coWboys, it is not
their communal or improvised "dogie" songs which are likely to
persist nearly intact among them for many decades. These rise
and die, impermanent and fluctuating by nature. The better
chance for life will be had by pieces like "Jesse James," or "Young
Charlotte," too regular of rhyme and meter and too symmetrical
of structure, though communal by preservation or destination, to
be of communal origin. More likely yet, compositions of the character
of "After the Ball," "There'll Be a Hot Time," "Juanita," or
"Lorena," now belonging to folk-song though not originating as
such, will linger among the cowboys long after their local improvisations
have perished. The purpose in this paper is not to risk prediction,
however, but merely to examine and contrast; and to this
it is time to return.
What now of the general nature of the subject-matter and style,
as related to the folk and their interests, of the English and Scottish
traditional ballads? We have seen that the songs originated by
the cowboys deal with the life nearest them and are couched in
the rude and nearly formless style most to be expected. They deal
1 Some songs of spontaneous local composition on Wyoming ranches are in the
possession of the writer, and some of similar composition brought by emigrants from
mining communities at Newcastle, England. All are crude in form, and show the same
commonplaceness and lack of poetical quality as the cowboy pieces.
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COWBOY SONGS AND POPULAR BALLADS 7
with the lives and the interests of the people among whom they arose
and by whom they were preserved. In the many discussions regarding
the authorship of the Old World ballads, the relation of the
themes of the songs to the singers has had curiously little emphasis.'
Yet the subject-matter of the English and Scottish popular ballads,
viewed as evidence concerning the nature of their origin, deserves
from critics not incidental treatment as a side issue, but to be faced
clearly as a main one.
Undoubtedly the shepherds, or knitters, or weavers, the "humble
people" of mediaeval communal conditions, paralleled by those on
western ranches, originated pieces of their own; as, according to the
testimony of Mr. Lomax, the western cowboys occasionally do. A
liking for or the gift of song may surely not be denied them. Of
what would these songs treat? Would they not be most likely
to deal with matters belonging to daily life; to reflect the tastes,
civilization, characters, paralleled, say, by "Bill" or the "dogie"
songs of the cowboy pieces? Would they not be genuinely, as
regards both material and style, the "homely traditional songs of
simple people," i.e., be the mediaeval counterparts of the crude
pieces for which modem communal origin may be affirmed? Perhaps,
too, they would more probably be songs than ballads, be
lyric rather than narrative; though on this nothing special hinges.
1 The matter is dismissed (in a note) in Professor Gummere's Old English Ballads
(Introd., p. xxvii) with the sentence: "This homogeneous character of a ballad-making
folk, by the way, is quite enough to explain the high rank of most personages in the
ballads-princes, knights, and so on." But difference between the life and interests
of the hall and of the village or rural throng was very marked in the Middle Ages. This
class cleavage is reflected in Froissart. Chaucer realized it when he placed knightly
matter in the mouths of his aristocratic pilgrims and bourgeois matter in the mouths
of those of lower class. In The Popular Ballad, Professor Gummere, while treating many
matters minutely, contributes on this topic only (p. 309): "The favorite characters
of the old ballad of communal tradition are the knight and the lady, wife or maid, who
were in the focus of communal view and represented the fairly homogeneous life of that
day." As if, for example, the "poor folk in cots" of Piers Plowman, or other humble
people, were responsible for the references in balladry to bowers and falcons and knightly
life, while artisans, peasants, husbandman, common soldiers, they mention not at all ?
Only in The Beginnings of Poetry, a book not primarily treating the English and Scottish
popular ballads, is Professor Gummere (pp. 178 if.) much concerned with the characters
and the material of these ballads. Here there is insistence again on homogeneous
conditions, the "ballad community." He is content, by specific statement, with purely
communal origin for the aristocratic "Edward," "The Two Brothers," and "Babylon."
How far is the hypothesis of the homogeneous character of the mediaeval community
historically tenable ? Cowboy society is much more homogeneous, tested by its
poetry and by the general character of the life reflected, than was the mediaeval society
which fostered the English and Scottish popular ballads.
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8 LOUISE POUND
Yet folk-life and folk-themes are the one subject with which the
English and Scottish traditional ballads do not deal. In direct
contrast with our western pieces, the kind of people who are supposed
to have preserved them are the very people who do not appear in
them; much as though the cowboys sang never of themselves but
only of their employers, or of those above them in the social scale.
The subject-matter of the Old World pieces is aristocratic, whether
they be romantic-domestic, military, or riddling; this is true, largely,
even for the "greenwood" pieces. The English and Scottish ballads
are well-wrought poetical tales, not crude songs, and they treat not
of humble folk at all, but of kings, princesses, knights, harpers, of
Lord Randal, King Estmere, Sir Patrick Spens, Young Hunting,
Child Waters, Young Beichan, the Douglas and the Percy. This
is true not only of a few special ballads but of the overwhelming
mass, by numerical calculation. The half-dozen or so in which
appear a mason, a ship-carpenter, a smith, a butler, are exceptional.
The ballads are as aristocratic in their material as the metrical
romances, or as mediaeval literature in general. They have a distinctive
style, too, and real poetical quality, blurred by the manner
of their preservation; a quality that improvised pieces, unless adaptations,
do not show. The folk preserved them, but did they
originate them? Somewhere, as said earlier, behind the theme,
story, or melody of the ballad which is to find perpetuation, there
must be more than ordinary impetus; widespread interest such as
that centering about outlaws like Jesse James or Robin Hood; in
battles like those between the Texas Rangers and the Indians, or
those of the Scottish Border; in national characters like Garfield,
or like the Percy and the Douglas. The pieces that stand out as
of better execution or more striking character are those that persist.
Improvised origin at some homogeneous folk-gathering would not
typically afford the elan to bring outside currency. In the ballads
collected by Professor Child, those which are nearest to folk life
and to folk style, as paralleled by the western pieces, those which
might most plausibly have had the type of origin sketched by
Professor Kittredge for "The Hangman's Tree,"' are those farthest
1 Introduction to English and Scottish Popular Ballads, pp. xxv-xxviii. Professor
C. Alphonso Smith, "The Negro and the Ballad," in the University of West Virgini
Alumni Bulletin, January, 1913, suggests as an example of modern communal compo
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COWBOY SONGS AND POPULAR BALLADS 9
from the "good" type established by pieces dealing with aristocratic
themes.
The ballad last cited, "The Hangman's Tree," is selected as
typical to illustrate the probable manner of composition of the
English and Scottish ballads, by both Professor Kittredge,' who
bases his argument on an Americanized version, and Professor
Gummere.2 On the other hand, Mr. T. F. Henderson3 urges of
this piece that it is far from a typical instance in that all ballads
are not fashioned on the model of this; nor are they by any means
so simple in plot or so inevitable in structure and diction. It may
be added here that in point of characters the ballad in question is
exceptional also. It is nearly the only piece in the collection in
which the main characters, at least in the older versions, do not
have perforce to be interpreted as people of rank. The versions
that we have of "The Hangman's Tree" are neutral; they do not
specify. Possibly then this particular ballad might afford an instance
of humble people improvising about themselves, not choosing some
theme more germane to the harper and the castle hall than to the
cottage and the village throng. Yet it is as likely, or likelier, that
the ballad as we have it has descended from one of definitely higher
life; much as "Lord Randal" evolved into the "Johnny Randall"
of a Colorado railway camp, or "The Two Brothers," Sir John and
Sir Willie, of the Scottish ballad,4 became merely "Two Little Boys"
in their New World home. To find a piece which might plausibly
illustrate the unanimous village throng collaborating on a suitable
theme, a composition was chosen which instead of being representative
was nearly the only one of its kind to be found by canvassing
the whole group.
sition certain negro revival hymns and plantation melodies. "If one will attend a
negro revival in the country or suburban districts of the South he can see and hear this
process of communal composition, about which so much has been written and surmised."
The illustrations cited by Professor Smith are simpler than "The Hangman's Tree."
They are songs, not poetical narratives, and they deal with the familiar revival material
of the negroes. In general nature, in suitability to the composers and to the occasion,
they are much what might be foreseen.
1 Introduction to English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1904), p. xxv.
2 The Popular Ballad (1907), p. 101; also the Nation, August 29, 1907; also Democracy
and Poetry (1911), p. 193.
3 The Ballad in Literature (1912), pp. 72-79.
4 See note 4 supra, p. 198.
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10 LOUISE POUND
We are told that "the ballad genesis is more plainly proved
for the Faroes than for any other modern people."' But those
originated by the Faroe Islanders, when they improvised ballads,
seem to be wholly of the expected character and general style.
Witness the narrative cited by Professor Gummere of the Faroe
fisherman and his boat,2 or the folk tale of the girl carried off by
Frisian pirates.3 Clearly, like the southwestern cowboys, the Faroe
Islanders improvised concerning the events nearest them, and in
equally crude style, no doubt. Nor is it proved of these pieces so
created that they gained much currency.4 The best ballads from
the Faroes are derived admittedly from Icelandic literary tradition.
They tell not of fishermen or girls carried off by pirates but of the
deeds of Sigurd. They are pieces of high descent. Similarly with
the songs of more contemporary communal creation in modern
Europe brought together with painstaking erudition by Professor
Gummere.5 The pieces improvised concern the singers themselves,
their own lives and daily work. They are songs rather than ballads,
nor is there evidence that they ultimately developed into more
elaborate form, or attained higher poetical quality; nor that they
gained much diffusion. Like the Faroe pieces, they are on a par
with the improvised cowboy songs rather than with the English
and Scottish popular ballads. The soldiers who took part in the
Battle of Otterbourne may have made their own songs of that battle,6
but their songs would have had little chance to endure beside those
made by the minstrels who are urged to "play up for your warison,"7
or those from some yet higher source. Once a good one was made,
expressing "the mind and heart of the people," much, say, as did
1 Gummere, The Popular Ballad (1907), p. 69. His position is, specifically, that the
popular ballad arises from communal beginnings, such as those found among the Faroe
Islanders, followed by an "epic development." When, where, or from whom the latter
comes, he cannot, or does not, clearly set forth.
2 Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., pp. 109, 150, etc.
4 Accessible in H. Thuren's Folke Sangen paa Fwerrne (1908). Mr. Henderson
remarks of the Faroe fisher ballads that "they are very woeful specimens of verse, of
interest only from their touching and almost childish naivete; and they are not sung to
native melodies of ancient fisher tradition or of new fisher improvisation but to lugubrious
tunes borrowed, according to Thuren, from Protestant Psalmody."--The Ballad
in Literature, p. 88.
5 The Beginnings of Poetry (1901), pp. 202 ff.
6 Gummere, The Popular Ballad, p. 265, but see also his admission, p. 260, of minstrel
part in the ballad as we have it.
7 Stanza 43.
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COWBOY SONGS AND POPULAR BALLADS 11
the "Marseillaise," "John Brown's Body," "Marching through
Georgia," or "Auld Lang Syne," (does it matter much to those who
sing these pieces who originally composed them ?), public interest
in, and memory of, the event and the song would furnish the necessary
impetus for diffusion. From this point of view, if songs of the Faroe
fisher folk, or of the toiling village throngs of modem Europe, or of
the Texas cowboys, throw light on the manner of origin of the
English and Scottish popular ballads, they point to a genesis for the
latter of some much higher kind.
Nor, if the parallel of the western pieces be still followed out,
is the style of expression of the English and Scottish ballads a style
which we should expect to find shepherds or plowmen or weavers,
"spinsters and knitters in the sun," evolving from crude collaboration.
The older the version, the nearer to the original form, the
better is the style likely to be. The latter, like the subject-matter,
bears the hall mark of a high descent. In the oldest pieces, as
"The Battle of Otterbourne," there are phrases and alliterative
formulae recalling that fixed poetic vocabulary not used in ordinary
speech (bern, freke, byrd, etc.) which Dr. Bradley reminds us was
characteristic of a group of professional poets about the middle of
the fourteenth century.' The diction of the older ballads preserves
many of the stereotyped alliterative phrases of the metrical romances.
To the present writer, another mannerism of ballad expression seems
well worthy of attention, in the search for stable testimony as to
origins.2 The liking for "shifted" or " wrenched" accent (Douglds,
Lond6n, forest) is familiar to all students of traditional English
balladry. For explanation of this it would seem clear that we have
to proceed from French loan words, preserving for a while their
final accent (certdyne, countrte, pite, menye, chamber), with occasional
transfer of this accentuation, through confusion, to native words
having properly initial accent3 (ladie, daughter, mornnyge, les'nge.)
1 The Cambridge History of English Literature, I, chap. xix.
2 Even Professor Gummere is troubled by the thought of an aristocratic origin for
the ballad stanza, derived almost certainly, it was long believed, from the classical septenarius
(Old English Ballads, xxx, note 3); but the whole subject of the genesis of the
ballad stanza is too dark for very safe inference to be drawn therefrom. See Saintsbury,
History of English Prosody (1906), for a recent discussion of the origin of the
ballad measure.
3 Some prosodists might hold that these "wrenched accents" are only instances of
"pitch accent," and derive them from Old English. Others may feel that they are
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The words so stressed were prominent words in the line, were often
rhyme words, the most stable words in the stanza; hence the usage
established itself as traditional and remained a persistent feature
of ballad diction. But the origin of the practice is surely to be
found in aristocratic French, not in the vernacular initial accent of the
folk. The tradition was more likely to emerge from the rhyme modes
of the higher classes, or from a professional singing fraternity, than
from humble "spinsters and knitters in the sun." To judge from
the character of the stories narrated and the life reflected, perhaps
from the general nature of the ballad stanza, and of the expression,
the English and Scottish pieces may well have been favored and
fostered by the upper classes, as they almost certainly were in
Denmark. They might well have been sung in the halls of castles
or in the market place with harp accompaniment by accomplished
minstrels.'
The parallel suggested by the writers quoted at the opening is
as interesting as they promised; although conclusions from it, if
they are to be made at all, are not to be made hurriedly. It is
clear, however, that the better analogy for the Old World pieces
is afforded not by those created by the cowboys themselves but
by those which have drifted among them and found preservation
there.2 On the whole, if either of the two leading schools of thought
merely crudenesses, made possible by the fact that the ballads were sung not read. But
the final accent is too clearly marked, and is used too definitely and too frequently, at
least in the earlier pieces, to be explained as something merely casual or fortuitous.
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COWBOY SONGS AND POPULAR BALLADS 13
regarding the origin of the English and Scottish ballads may be
said to find support in the testimony of the latter's New World
analogues, it is not that school which defines by origin in folk composition,
but that which presupposes a higher descent, and defines by
style and by destination. In the case of the New World pieces, we
are dealing with genuine "humble poetry of simple folk"; in the
case of the English and Scottish popular ballads we are dealing with
poetry of aristocratic material, having traces blurred by time of
an aristocratic manner. Working from both subject-matter and
style, it would seem that among the cowboys of the Southwest are
reproduced not the conditions which created the English and Scottish
popular ballads but rather, it may be, some of the conditions which
preserved them.
LOUISE POUND
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA
----------------------
Footnotes:
1 Cowboy Songs. Collected by John A. Lomax. New York, 1910. See also G. W.
Will, " Songs of Western Cowboys," Journal of American Folk-Lore,, XXII, XXVI.
2 Lomax, Cowboy Songs, Introduction.
s Ibid., Prefixed letter, dated from Cheyenne, 1910.
4 Medieval Story. New York, 1911.
1 The ministrel of the pre-modern era, that conspicuous figure of the mediaeval
world, was a very different figure from the minstrel of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, "ruled out of court" by Professor Kittredge. The latter says: "There is no
reason whatever for believing that the state of things between 1300 and 1600 was different
[as regards minstrel transmission of ballads] from that between 1600 and 1800--and there
are many reasons for believing that it was not different" (Introd. to English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, p. xxiii). But the change from feudal to modern conditions, and
especially the introduction of printing, would be quite enough to bring difference in the
standing of minstrelsy and in the character of its song.
For the best account of mediaeval minstrels, the higher and the lower orders, the
wide scope of their singing, their fondness for dialogue, and the like, see E. K. Chambers,
The Mediaeval Stage, (1903), I, chaps. iii and iv.
2 It should not much longer be reiterated, at least without careful definition and
restriction to a certain type, that the making of popular ballads is a "closed account."
Already there has accumulated in outlying regions a considerable body of American
ballads, somehow finding diffusion among the people and preserved in many communities
by oral tradition. For a general survey of these, see H. M. Belden, "Balladry in
America," in the Journal of American Folk-Lore, January-March 1912, and the bibliographical
references there. The style of these American pieces is not that of the
English and Scottish popular ballads; but that is no more to be expected than that
modern book poetry should continue the style of mediaeval book poetry. Surely it
should not be said much longer that folk-ballads or traditional ballads, "popular "
ballads in the usual sense of that term, are no longer living things; that real folk-ballads
are practically extinct. The distinction between "popular," "pure," or "genuine"
ballads and "vulgar" ballads, the former ballad type the product of the people in a
special sense, under social conditions no longer existing in England or America, the only
type of ballad to be claimed for folk-lore, and a type now obsolete; the latter or socalled
"vulgar" ballad type written for the people, a low form of "literature" in the
usual notation of that term, and not belonging to folk-lore--this distinction, so long
insisted upon and held to be of such importance, serving for many as basic in ballad
classification, is probably not sound; at least not in so far as it is based on origin rather
than style. It would seem that there need be no difference between the kinds in origin;
that one kind does not belong to folk-lore to the exclusion of the other; also that neither,
despite the special pleading of Professor Gummere, need represent or be a direct continuant
of primitive poetry.