Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border
by John A. Lomax
The Sewanee Review, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Jan., 1911), pp. 1-18
COWBOY SONGS OF THE MEXICAN BORDER
by John A. Lomax
"What keeps the herd from running,
And stampede far and wide?
The cowboy's long, low whistle,
And singing by their side."
"Oh, it was a long and tiresome go,
Our herd rolled on to Mexico;
With music sweet of the cowboy song,
For New Mexico we rolled along."
These two stanzas from different songs suggest the cowboy's own reasons for his singing. The interpretation of these songs,
their ultimate source, history, and positive literary value involve many interesting questions.
In the western part of the United States, particularly in the states and territories bordering on Mexico, besides the number of perverted old-world ballads and broadsides commonly found among English people living more or less in primitive fashion, there is a considerable body of indigenous popular songs that have sprung up as has the grass on the plains, and from sources quite as undeterminable. These songs have been handed down, like the Masonic Ritual, by word of mouth, and even now are circulated chiefly by means of oral recital. Some have been printed in local papers and a few others have in recent years appeared in popular accounts of western life, or in such publications as the American Journal of Folk Lore. The great bulk of the material, however, exists only either in rude manuscript form, or in the minds of those who chant the songs in the wild, far-away places of the big and still unpeopled West.
That unique figure in American civilization, the cowboy, is popularly supposed to be the creator, as he certainly is the transmitter of these songs. For the past five or six years I have been trying
to collect the words of the most typical of the frontier songs,
and, whenever possible, to secure also the tunes to which they
are sung. The present result of my work, in my opinion, forms
only a meagre part of the existing material. I have brought
together considerably more than one hundred of what I have
tentatively labeled cowboy songs, a number of them taken down
from the lips of ex-cowboys themselves. Of some of the songs,
I have from five to twenty slightly varying versions. In the
majority of cases, the words seem satisfactorily complete. A
considerable percentage of the collection, however, are probably
only fragments. In addition to the seemingly complete songs,
I have secured smaller fragments of nearly one hundred more of
what Professor H. M. Beiden, of Missouri, chooses to call song
ballads. After a careful sifting of this material, it is possible
that the number of distinctly cowboy songs may be reduced ;
fragments also may turn out to be merely isolated stanzas with
out any real parent song.
I give the local habitation of all this material to the south
western border states, simply because of the fact that I have
found the most of it there. I have correspondents in practi
cally every state and territory west of the Mississippi River;
nevertheless, fully seventy-five per cent of the songs have come
from Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico. Even when the songs
were secured elsewhere, the sender usually attributed their
sources to one of the three states mentioned,?-Texas getting a
much larger share. In addition, I have found cowboy songs in
Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colo
rado, Oklahoma, California, Missouri, and Nevada. The point
of chief interest in this wide distribution is that the same song
is seen to be popular in the early days of, for example, Washing
ton and Texas?a song too, which, if at all, has been only recently
in print. My information leads me to believe that the song,
"The Dying Cowboy," was known before the days of railroads
in every state that I have mentioned. Its wide distribution and
Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border 3
the common occurrence of many others is probably due to the
roving nature of the cowboys and the early westerners, and
furthermore to the fact that traffic in large herds of cattle was
once common between such distant places as Texas and Mon
tana. There are yet physical traces of one or two of the old
cattle trails that led between these two states. An old trail song
says, "Montana is too cold for me. It is there I won't be
found;" while in Texas, "I will not catch consumption by
sleeping on the ground." Several of the songs seem to owe
their origin, indeed, to the experiences of cattlemen on the long
drives between these two states. A stirring one begins, "Come
along, boys, and listen to my tale, I'll tell you of my troubles on
the old Chisholm Trail." This particular song is said to be as
long as the trail from Texas to Montana. I know of one person
who claims to be able to sing 143 stanzas of it. The men going
up the trails scattered the songs as they rode along. Such as
suited popular fancy have lived, and are yet current in isolated
communities. Owen Wister tells in The Virginian of how his
hero sings sixty-three stanzas of a cowboy song known as "My
Lulu Girl," only one verse of which was found fit for publication ;
while his comrades, in accompaniment, beat holes in the ground
with the heels of their boots. It is generally understood that
Mr. Wister located the scene of The Virginian in Montana.
The "Lulu" song to which he refers is known wherever I
have been in Western Texas, and affords another illustration
ot the widespread currency of cowboy melodies.
The songs in my collection have come from different sources.
Many of them were given to me by students of West Texas who
have been in my classes; some I have obtained from the files of
a Texas newspaper of large circulation, which for a number of
years has printed a column of old familiar songs; some have
come from manuscript scrap books; some, as I have said before,
have been taken down from the lips of ex-cowboys, now in many
cases staid and respected citizens. A number of the most in
teresting songs were obtained from four negroes who have had
experience in ranch life. One of these negroes is now a Pullman
car porter, one is a farmer in the Texas Panhandle, one runs a
saloon in San Antonio, and the fourth keeps an undertaker's
4 The Sewanee Review
shop. I had the rather unusual experience of sitting in a dark
room surrounded by coffins while my negro undertaker friend
sang into my phonograph an Australian Bush song, widely
popular among the cowboys, known as "Jack Donahoo." As in
the case of collectors of old English ballads, my best sources of
immediate information have been the more illiterate class of
people. The ultimate sources of the songs is a matter, at least
partly, of conjecture. I have had many interesting notes from
cowboys themselves as to the origin of the songs they gave me.
One wrote, "I don't know how this come to be made up, as I
have knew it a long time and don't remember when I first heard
it or how long I have knew it.
' '
The same gentleman writes of
another, "This song is said to have been composed by his com
rades who were in the roundup with him at the time he met his
fate by being killed with a horse falling upon him. How true
it is, I cannot say as I was not there and I never knew the man
that was killed; so I can't say how it was." Such testimony is
typical of much I have been able to get. My informant either
says, "I learned this from another cowman," or, "Some of the
boys just made it up, I don't know where or when." I had the
story of the composition of one song, "The Buffalo Skinners,"
from an ex-cowboy who claims to have got his information from
one of the participants in the tragedy. The song tells of a party of
men being hired to kill buffalo by a dealer in buffalo hides. At
the end of a summer full of hard experiences, the dealer in hides
was unable to pay his men *
for their work. Whereupon, they
shot him down and left his body on the range of the buffalo.
As they rode along back to civilization or as they sat about the
camp fire at night, the men of the party jointly composed the
song, now widely current in the Southwest. A few of the trail
songs are unquestionably of composite authorship. On one
occasion, in a hotel in San Antonio, two men from different
sections of Texas, sang to me numerous stanzas of a trail song.
The stanzas from the two sections were entirely different and
neither of the men had ever heard before those furnished by the
other. Since then, I have several additional contributions to the
same song. The tune only has all along been identical. In
most instances, the slight differences noticed in copies of the
Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border 5
same song are quite certainly due to oral transmission; though
now and then an extra stanza creeps in as if to show that the
songs do really grow as they are passed round. I have made no
progress at all in my search for authors, save to discover four
individuals all of whom claim the authorship of the same
song.
It follows that, since the authorship of none of these songs
can be determined, the precise dates of their composition are
equally unknown. Very likely the great majority of them were
written during the last fifty or sixty years. The social con
ditions which gave them birth are of noteworthy significance.
The large cattle ranches of early days were often one hundred
miles and further from places where the conventions of society
are observed. On extremely few of these ranches was there a
woman in the household. The ranch community consisted
simply of the boss, the cowboys proper, the horse wranglers,
and the cook. These men lived on terms of perfect equality.
Except in the case of the boss, there was little difference in
the amount paid each for his services. Society here was re
duced to its lowest terms. The work of the men, their daily
experiences, their thoughts, their interests, were all in common.
Such a community had necessarily to feed on itself for enter
tainment. There were no books or magazines, and visitors
came at rare intervals. It was perfectly natural, then, for the
men to seek diversion in song. Whatever the most gifted man
could produce had to bear the criticism of the entire camp, and
in a sense had to agree with the ideas of a group of men ; else
their ridicule would soon force it to be modified. Any song,
therefore, that came from such a group would probably be the
joint product of a number of them. I have often had this state
ment corroborated by ranchmen who had never heard any theory
concerning the origin of ballads.
The choruses of such community songs seem especially in
vented to urge on the cattle when they grew tired on the long
drives. The cowboy's shrill cries, his "whooping and yelling"
in thousands of variations, as well as the pop of the whip that he
once carried, were employed to encourage the cattle to move
faster. These cries were, in occasional instances at least,
6 The Sewanee Review
merged into measured verses, fitted to tunes, and finally attached
permanently to some cowboy narrative in verse.
Still another condition out of which grew the songs was the
loneliness of the men while night-herding after bedding the
cattle down for the night, and after their comrades, all save one
or two, were asleep. Almost universally, cowboys tell me that
the voice had a quieting effect, and prevented the cattle from
becoming restless or frightened during the long watches of the
night. So they were soothed to sleep and soothed after they
were asleep, by what the men sometimes called "dogie songs."
What was first an incoherent chant or croon, b came next
fixed cries of tested practical worth, and, finally, a song with
words,? the words perhaps coming in to relieve the monotony
of repeating over and over the same calls. A similar develop
ment may be frequently observed in the Southern negro. The
leader is expected to give the cry for concerted action. Weary
ing of repeating a single call, he begins to improvise, soon
adopts a rhythm fitted to the work he and his companions are
doing, and in a short time another negro song is in full swing.
Coming at last to the subject matter of the songs : what are
the stories they tell? I have separated my collection into
seven divisions; namely: cowboy songs, trail songs, humor
ous songs, songs of western experiences and western life, mis
cellaneous songs, and Spanish songs. Perhaps some of the titles
will give a clearer idea of their contents. Among the cowboy
songs are found : The Kansas Line, The Dying Cowboy, A
Cowboy's Life, A Midnight Stampede, The Range Riders, The
Cowboy's Lament, The Cattle Stampede, The Cowboy Renegade,
The Melancholy Cowboy. Among the trail songs, A Cowboy
Song, The Lone Star Trail, The Crooked Trail to Holbrook,
The Chisholm Trail, John Garner's Trail Herd. Others from
different groups are: The Dying Ranger, Mustang Gray, Ran
gers on the Scouts, The Texas Rangers, California Joe, Cole
Younger, The Great Roundup, The Dim Narrow Trail, The
Zebra Dun, When Bob Got Throwed, The Tenderfoot Cowboy,
The Cowboy's Hopeless Love, Joe Bowers from Pike, The
Buffalo Skinners, Freighting from Wilcox to Globe, The Days of
Forty-Nine, The Trials of a Morman Settler, The Bishop's
Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border 7
Lament (another Morman song), Buckskin Joe, The Dreary
Black Hills, The Dying Californian, The Home of the Range,
and many others.
Grouping the songs according to subject matter, it is seen
that they treat of the troubles between Texas and Mexico ; of
the Texas Rangers, with whom the cowboys maintained close
relations,? often indeed, their work was identical. They tell of
the cowboy's home, his mother, his sweetheart; they make
heroes of outlaws such as Sam Bass, Jesse James, and Cole
Younger ; they often reproduce versions of the old-world ballads
or the later broadsides; they treat in particular of the cowboy's
daily routine of life, his hardships, his troubles in the frontier
towns where he occasionally visits ; his mix-ups with the law,
which he has come to look upon as an infringement of his
liberty ; his thoughts of death, at all times very close to him.
Some typical stanzas from the songs may be the best means of
setting forth exactly what they are. I quote the first six lines
of one which refers to the fall of the Alamo :
It was one Domingo morning, just at the break of day,
That holy Sabbath morning when Christians went to pray,
The Texas bugle sounded the final overthrow
Of Freedom's sons surrounded, in the fatal Alamo.
And across the lonely prairie there comes a tale of woe
From Guadulupe's azure tide to the fatal Alamo.
When Mustang Gray, a famous Texas Ranger, died, a song
was made about him, telling something of his history. The
chorus of this song runs:
No more he'll go a-ranging the savage to affright ;
He has heard his last warwhoop and fought his last fight.
Among the warnings of another ranger is this stanza:
Perhaps you have a mother, likewise a sister, too,
And maybe so a sweetheart to grieve and mourn for you.
If this be your condition, although you'd like to roam,
I'd advise you by experience, you had better stay at home.
Again, a ranger sings :
Though sore it may grieve you,
The ranger must leave you,
Exposed to the arrow and knife of your foe ;
So herd your own cattle and fight your own battle,
For home to the states we are determined to go.
8 The Sewanee Review
The cowboy sometimes spoke of nature:
My ceiling is the sky, my floor is the grass,
My music is the lowing of the herds as they pass ;
My books are the brooks, my sermons the stones,
My parson is a wolf on his pulpit of bones.
Or again:
Oh, I love these wild flowers in this dear land of ours,
The curlew I love to hear scream ;
And I love the white rocks and the antelope flocks
That graze on the mountain tops green.
We do not usually think of a cowboy as a religious person.
He says himself, "For on the plains we scarcely know a Sunday
from a Monday." They, however, sing of God in terms of
familiarity and in the language of the range:
They say He will never forget you,
That He knows every action and look,
So for safety you had better keep branded ?
Have your name on His big Tally Book.
If the cowboy ever gets to Heaven, it will probably be with
out the proper earmarks, for as he says :
Perhaps I will be a stray cowboy,
A maverick, unbranded on high,
And get cut in the bunch with the "rusties,"
When the Boss of the Riders goes by.
and again,
Last night as I lay on the prairie,
And looked up at the stars in the sky,
I wondered if ever a cowboy
Would drift to that Sweet Bye and Bye.
Still another cowboy sings :
At midnight, when the cattle are sleeping,
On my saddle I pillow my head,
And up at the heavens lie peeping
From out of my cold, grassy bed,?
Often and often I've wondered,
At night when lying alone,
If every bright star up yonder
Is a big peopled world like our own.
Like other boys who have drifted away from home, the cow
boy's thoughts often went back to the place of his childhood.
In the Dreary Black Hills, he sings :
Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border 9
Don't go away, stay at home if you can ;?
Stay away from that city,
They call it Cheyenne ;
For Old Sitting Bull and Comanche Bills,
They will lift up your hair
On the Dreary Black Hills.
And it's home, dearest home, over the Gila
In the white man's country,
Where the poplar and the ash and the oak
Will ever be, growing green on the Gila,
There's a home for you and me.
Sometimes he sings of his western home :
Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the sky is not cloudy all day.
Often he tells of the cause that sent him roving. Occasion
ally it has been his sweetheart :
These locks she has curled, shall the rattlesnake kiss?
This brow she has kissed, shall the cold grave press?
His nearness to Mexico now and then brings about a romance:
A se?orita loved him, and followed by his side,
She opened wide the gates and gave to him her father's steed to ride ;?
God bless the se?orita, the bell of Monterey,
She opened wide the prison door and let him ride away.
Sometimes he speaks of her in jocular familiarity :
There was a little gal,
And she lived with her mother;
All the devils out of hell
Couldn't scare up such another.
More often, however, his songs tell of his thoughts of her at
death's dim hour :
Tell her when death was on my brow
And life receding fast,
Her looks, her form were with me then,
Were with me to the last.
On Buena Vista's bloody field,
Tell her I dying lay,
And I knew her thoughts were with me
Some thousand miles away.
Again,
i o The Sewanee Review
In one song he goes back East to his old home and finds his
sweetheart married. After being begged by her to stay at home,
he retorts :
O, it's curse your gold and silver, too,
Confound a girl that won't prove true.
I will cut my way where the bullets fly
And stay on the trail till the day I die.
Another cowboy was spared the trip East by receiving a
letter :
One day I got a letter from my dear, kind brother Ike.
It came from old Missouri,?yes, all the way from Pike;
It said my Sallie was fickle, her love for me had fled,
That she had married another whose hair was awful red,
It told me more than that, it's enough to make me swear,?
It said that Sallie had a baby and the baby had red hair.
Persistently, nevertheless, did his life of privation drive him
to thoughts of the comforts of home :
Speaking of your farms and your shanty charms,
Speaking of your silver and gold,?
Take a cowman's advice,
Go marry you a true and lovely little wife,
Never to roam, always stay at home ;
Take a cowman's advice, a cowman's advice,
Way up on the Kansas line.
The men who are his heroes may have been lawless despera
does, as was Robin Hood, but they are at least brave :
They never would flinch, whatever the pinch,
They never would fret or whine ;
Like good old bricks, they stood the kicks
In the days of Forty-Nine.
Of Jesse James, a song says :
Jesse James was a man, a friend of the poor,
He never would see a man suffer pain.
All the people held their breath
When they heard of Jesse's death,
And they wondered how he came to die.
But the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard,
He killed poor Jesse on the sly.
When Jim Murphy betrayed Sam Bass, the Texas outlaw, and
aided in his capture and death, the unknown chronicler sings :
Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border 11
He sold out Sam and Barnes,
And left their friends to mourn;
O, what a scorching Jim will get
When Gabriel blows his horn.
The greater portion of the songs, however, deal with the
cowboy's own experiences with life. In one of them, he says :
O, the cowpuncher loves the whistle of his rope,
As he races over the plains ;
And the stage driver loves the popper of his whip
And the jingle of his concord chains.
And we'll all pray the Lord that we will be saved,
And we'll keep the golden rule ;
But I'd rather be at home with the girl I love
Than to monkey with this dad-blamed mule.
He boasts in another:
I'm a rowdy cowboy, just off the stormy plains;
My trade is cinching 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.
A rainstorm at night on a drive meant activity for all :
I've been where the lightnin', the lightnin', tangled in my eyes,
The cattle I could scarcely hold ;
Think I heard my boss man say,
I want all brave-hearted men who ain't afraid to die
To whoop up the cattle from morning till night,
All out in the midnight rain.
He talks familiarly to the little "dogies," the runt yearlings,
that always bring up the rear of a large herd :
Get along, get along, little dogies,
You are going to be the beef steer bye and bye ;
Your mother she was raised way down in Texas,
Where the jimson-weed and sand-burrs grow.
Now we will fill you up on prickly-pear and cholla
Till you are ready for the trail to Idaho.
O, you will be soup for Uncle Sam's Indians ;
It's
"
beef, heap beef," you will hear them cry.
Get along, get along, little dogies,
For the Indians they will eat you bye and bye.
And again :
Early in the spring we round up the dogies,
Mark and brand them and bob off their tails,
12 The Sewanee Review
Round up our horses, load up the mess wagon,
And throw the dogies up on the trail.
It's whooping and yelling and driving the dogies,
O, how I wish you would go on ;
It's whooping and punching and go on little dogies,
For you know Wyoming will be your new home.
Still another cattle driving song runs :
It is out on the road these sights are to be seen,
The antelope, the buffalo, the prairie all so green;
The antelope, the buffalo, the rabbit jumped so high,?
It's whack the cattle on boys,
Root hog or die.
Often the cowboy warned his hearers against the hardship of
the life on the range :
Come, all you Texas cowboys,
And warning take from me,
And don't go to Montana
To spend your money free ;
But stay at home in Texas,
Where the works they are the year around,
And you will not catch consumption
A-sleeping on the ground,
Again, another song says :
The cowboy's life is a dreary, dreary life,
He is driven through the heat and cold ;
He is almost froze with the water on his clothes
A-riding through the heat and cold.
Sometimes he would get into money troubles and go on a
strike :
I went to the boss to draw my roll,
And he had it figured out
I was nine dollars in the hole.
I will sell my outfit just as soon as I can?
I won't punch cattle for no damned man.
Another cowboy chants :
I have seen the fruits of rambling,
I know its hardships well,
I have crossed the Rocky Mountains,
Rode down the streets of hell.
I have been in the great Southwest,
Where the wild Apaches roam,
And I will tell you from experience,
You had better stay at home.
Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border i 3
Sometimes he is frank enough to confess that all his troubles
were not due to the exposure and hard work of a cowboy's life :
It's beefsteak when I'm hungry
And whisky when I'm dry ;
Rye whisky, rye whisky, rye whisky, I cry ;
If I don't get rye whisky,
I surely will die.
Jack of diamonds, Jack of diamonds, I know you of old,
You've robbed my poor pockets
Of silver and gold;
Whisky, you villain,
You've been my downfall.
You've kicked me, you've cuffed me,
But I love you for all.
Baby, O baby, I have told you before,
Do make me a pallet,
I'll lay on the floor.
Still another gives us a glimpse of the sad
rough rider :
It was once in the saddle
I used to go dashing ;
It was once in the saddle
I used to go gay.
First to the dram house,
Then to the card house?
Got shot in the breast,
I'm dying to-day.
At times his songs treat of one in the grip of the law :
Arid you have your liberty
Pray keep it if you can,
And don't go round the streets at night
To break the laws of man ;
For if you do, you'll surely rue
And find yourself like me,
Serving out my twenty-one years
In the state penitentiary.
Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink,
O, don't you hear the clinking of my chains !
He often regrets his evil ways :
If I had listened to my mother,
I would not have been this way,
But being young and foolish,
I threw myself away.
ending of many a
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The jury found me guilty,
In the very first degree;
Farewell, my honored lady,
I died for love of thee.
The cowboy's thoughts naturally ran on death, for death was
at all times at his shoulder-blade. In one of his songs be begs
his comrades :
O bury me not on the lone prairie,
Where the wild coyotes will howl o'er me,
Where the rattlesnakes hiss and the crows sport free,
O bury me not on the lone prairie ;
but as the song concludes,
They buried him there on the lone prairie
Where the owl all night hoots mournfully,
And the blizzard beats and the winds blow free
O'er his lonely grave on the lone prairie.
A stampede occurs ; a cowboy is killed. The herd moves on,
leaving a mound by the trail:
Poor Charlie was buried at sunrise, no tombstone at his head,
Nothing but a little board, and this is what it said:
"
Charlie died at daybreak, he died from a fall,
And he'll not see his mother when the work's all done this fall."
The Dying Ranger ends similarly :
Far away from his darling sister,
We laid him down to rest,
With his saddle for his pillow
And his rifle across his breast.
But the cowboy was not long serious. He could joke about
the most serious things, even at death itself:
He'd ante you a stud, he could play you a draw,
He'd go you a hatful, blind ;
In a struggle with death, Bill lost his breath
In the days of Forty-Nine.
And old Aunt Jess, like all the rest,
At death he did resign,
And in his bloom went up the flume
In the days of Forty-Nine.
For all his reckless dare-deviltry, the cowboy was popular ; in
fact, we who have lived near him, yet love him, and revere and
honor his memory.
Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Boraer 15
Then swing your rope slowly and rattle your spurs lowly
And give a wild whoop as you carry me along ;
We all love our cowboys, so young and so handsome,
We all love our cowboys although they've done wrong.
These excerpts have perhaps conveyed a more satisfactory
idea of the entire collection than would the printing of three or
four songs entire. Of course the hand of the conventional
verse-maker is frequently seen. It seems to me that there is
present, also, the ballad instinct of the race, temporarily thrown
back to primitive conditions, again actively at work. How much
relationship really exists between these songs and the ballads in
the Child collection, I am not ready to surmise about. Some
day I hope to have evidence that will throw light on the question.
A short time ago a former freshman student of mine from
Northern Arizona, now turned rover
again, sent me some verses.
Whether he wrote them himself or got them from some one else,
I shall probably never know. There is in them a little of the
deep solemnity, the poignant loneliness, the big, flat dreari
ness of our western plains ; and they come from the heart of a
real cowboy, speaking familiarly to his herd in the stillness of
the night :
O, slow up, dogies, quit your roving round,
You have wandered and tramped all over the ground,
O, graze along dogies, and feed kinda slow,
And don't forever be on the go,?
O, move slow, dogies, move slow.
I have circle-herded, trail-herded, and cross-herded, too,
But to keep you together, that's what I can't do.
My horse is leg-weary and I am awful tired,
But if I let you get away, I am sure to get fired,?
Bunch up, little dogies, bunch up.
O say, little dogies, when you going to lay down
And quit this forever shifting around ?
My limbs are weary, my seat is sore:
Oh, lay down, dogies, like you've laid down before,?
Lay down, little dogies, lay down.
Oh, lay still, dogies, since you have laid down,
Stretch away out on the big open ground ;
Snore loud, little dogies, and drown the wild sound
That will all go away when the day rolls around,?
Lay still, little dogies, lay still
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I cannot in this preliminary paper on what I believe to be an
inconsiderable portion of the cowboy songs, do other than
briefly suggest a few of the interesting problems that a full
collection will surely raise. In addition to the question of
origin, transmission, and consequent variation in both words and
music, the student of language will find in them a lot of
material worthy of his attention. The cowboy represented a
virile type. The expression of his emotion in the form of verse
would be interesting, even if he did not employ unusual
methods in giving it vent. The chief charm, it is true, lies in
his direct simplicity. In him, it seems to me, we come very
close to the primal man. He sings of his sufferings, his ex
periences, his recollections, his hopes,?just the things that
affect his daily life. He develops his own rules of grammar; he
employs words in unusual meanings; he borrows from the
Spanish vaquero; often he coins words ; he creates a vernacular
that is so apt and telling that some of the words have found
lodgment in the conservative East, and are now in the best
dictionaries. For example, a man by the name of Maverick,
living near San Antonio, Texas, acquired the habit of putting
his brand on any unbranded steer he happened to run across.
Soon, thereafter, any unbranded steer whatever was called a
'maverick' by the cowmen ; and now the word maverick is
commonly used in the West as a noun, as a
participle,
as an
adjective, and as a verb.
Examples of curious changes due to oral transmission occur
in great variety, while surprising and often ludicrous cases of
folk etymology are limited only by the number of copies of the
song collected from different localities. We know that by
derivation the word ballad means a dance-song. The cowboy
songs can lay no claim to being influenced by the motions of
the dance, although it is a fact that the metre of some is such
that the singing of the songs is an admirable substitute for the
dance-music whenever the fiddler fails to come. The metre
of the cowboy verses may have been influenced by the move
ment of his pony, the slow, monotonous rolling on of large
herds of longhorn cattle, the jingle of the curb-chain of his
bridle, or the musical tinkle of his big belled-spurs. Possibly,
Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border i7
also, the chorus of some of the trail songs grew out of Indian
yells.
I find skepticism especially strong as to the existence of a
distinct cowboy music. Without professing any technical
knowledge, I am, nevertheless, confident from what my own un
cultivated ears have heard, that when the tunes I am collecting
are published, the verdict will support my contention that
there is a genuine cowboy music. Many of the tunes will
no doubt be found to be borrowed or adapted, as is indeed
true of the words of some of the songs ; yet there will be
enough left to furnish a basis for the claim. Of this I have
no doubt.
For most people, the light that these songs will throw on the
unique figure of the cowboy will be of greatest interest. Still
very much misunderstood, he is almost universally caricatured
both by the press and by the stage. Perhaps these songs,
which come direct from the cowboy's heart, picturing his care
less and his tender emotions, as well as the daily routine of his
life, will give future generations a truer conception of what he
really was than is possessed now by those who know him only
through romances. At any rate, the songs seem to me, and to
other far more competent judges, worth preserving. Unless
they are soon rescued from oblivion, they, along with the big
cattle ranches, the roundup, the trail, will disappear. A few
more years and we shall know the real cowboy no longer except
through some such records as the songs he sang. He has
never concerned himself about his own history.
To the cowboy, more than to the goldseckers, more than to
Uncle Sam's soldiers, is due the civilization of the West. Along
his winding cattle-trails, the Forty-Niners found their way to
California. The Cowboy has fought back the Indians ever since
ranching became a business and as long as there were
Indians to fight. He was the Natty Bumppo of the South
west; he played his part in winning the great slice of terri
tory that the United States took away from Mexico; he
was the forerunner of the pioneer. Restless, adventurous,
fearless, bold as the sea-barons of Beowulf, he lived hard,
shot quick and true, and, not nearly so ofteri as one mjght
i8 The Sewanee Review
suppose, "died with his boots on." Many of the most wealthy
and respected citizens of the border states served as range riders
before settling down to quiet domesticity. The songs the cow
boy made to soothe his loneliness, to entertain his friends, and to
help him in his work should, and doubtless will, become an
essential part of his history.
John A. Lomax.
The University of Texas.