Preparing the Audience, Informing the Performers: John A. Lomax and Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
by Mark Fenster
American Music, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 260-277
Preparing the Audience, Informing the Performers: John A. Lomax and Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
MARK FENSTER
[Mark Fenster is a doctoral student at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.]
John A. Lomax's 1910 book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, while not the first collection of such material, was the first widely distributed, full length publication that featured the image of the cowboy as singer. Stanley Clark had included a few songs in his 1897 book Life and Adventures of the American Cow-Boy [1] and N. Howard Thorp's self-published, self-promoted and self-distributed collection/broadside Songs of the Cowboys had appeared in 1908.[2] But Lomax's longer book, published by Sturgis and Walton, a New York publishing house, received attention in all regions of the country as well as abroad. Cowboy Songs was republished four times between 1910 and 1916 by Sturgis and Walton before Macmillan bought out the firm and published enlarged editions and reprintings. The book's commercial success helped to bring John Lomax the kind of recognition that has led to his position as one of the leading figures in the history of American folksong musicology. In addition, Cowboy Songs and the work that surrounded it helped to prepare and inform audiences and performers for the commercial success of the singing cowboy that was to begin in the 1920s.
By referring to the work that surrounded it, I am maintaining that the historical importance of Cowboy Songs does not lie exclusively within its covers. Beyond the material artifact of the 1910 edition, the image of the singing cowboy was disseminated through reviews of the book, advertising for it, and Lomax's lecture tours. It was through these means that Lomax's Cowboy Songs, having moved beyond the regional confines that had limited the recognition of Thorps's earlier collection, reached a public increasingly aware and accepting of the image of the singing cowboy.
In addition, the book proved historically important for later cowboy singers. Many early radio cowboys, whose success preceded the addition of sound to movies, owned copies of Lomax's book, and recorded songs collected in it. A number of these singers had also either spent time on southwestern ranches or worked as cowboys, providing experiences that exposed them to "real" cowboys and their traditional songs. The connection of Lomax's work and traditional cowboy songs in general to the careers of the movie cowboy singers is less direct yet still important. Tracing the book's influence on this later generation is quite difficult due to the number of collections that followed Lomax's, the proliferation of cowboy songs and singers on the radio and in the movies, and the fact that Lomax's collection was often unattributed in recordings based on the versions in his book. Thus I do not argue that there would be no Gene Autry or Roy Rogers without the publication of Cowboy Songs, an argument that is, ultimately, unprovable and superfluous. I am instead arguing that Lomax's work helped to define both the repertoire and the romantic nature of the singing cowboy figure that was to follow in the mass media.
This romantic nature was a crucial aspect of Lomax's work. It followed the contemporary practice in popular literature and early film westerns of creating a nearly mythical image of the cowboy hero. In Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian, the hero is initially described in such terms: "Lounging there at ease against the wall was a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures .... He had plainly come many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon, as the dust upon him showed.... But no dinginess of travel or shabiness of attire could tarnish the splendor that radiated from his youth and strength."[3]
In his "Collector's Note" to the 1910 edition of Cowboy Songs, Lomax described his cowboys in a similarly awestruck tone: "They loved roaming; they loved freedom; they were pioneers by instinct; an impulse set their faces from the East, put the tang for roaming in their veins, and sent them ever, ever westward."[4] Lomax's romantic musings on the cowboy followed the popular spirit and extended this mythic quality to the cowboy's songs.
My purpose, then, is twofold: first, to outline the historical importance of John Lomax and Cowboy Songs to the public's perception of the romantically perceived singing cowboy figure; and second, to document the influence of Lomax's work on singing cowboys performing on the radio and, later, in the movies. As a result of constant updating for an expanding contemporary audience, both the figure and the music of the movie cowboy singer were quite distinct from that which Lomax espoused. But Lomax's influence, buried under the multitude of printed, recorded, and filmed texts that followed his early work, was important in the successful expansion of the growing myth of the cowboy.
It became public knowledge that the cowboy sang. John Avery Lomax was born in Mississippi in 1867, but grew up along a branch of the old Chisholm trail in Bosque County, Texas. In his autobiography he recalled that as a youth, when he lay on his bed at night, he could hear cowboys singing as they rode the trail and caroused in the saloons of the small town.[5] It was during the early 1870s that cowboy songs began to be sung on ranches and in settlements. In the coming decades, texts began to be published in plains and western newspapers and magazines, and in a few national periodicals as well.[6]
Lomax began to collect these songs and, when he moved to Austin to enter the University of Texas in 1895, he carried in his trunk a tightly rolled batch of songs in manuscript form. He showed this batch to a professor at the University, and the outcome virtually ended the early stage of Lomax's career as a "ballad hunter": [7] Lomax remembered:
Timidly I handed Dr. Callaway my roll of dingy manuscript written in lead pencil and tied together with cotton string .... [He] told me that my samples of frontier literature were tawdry, cheap and unworthy. I had better give my attention to the great movement of writing that had come down the ages .... His decision, exquisitely considered, was final, absolute ... I was unwilling to have anyone else see the examples of my folly, or know of my disappointment. So that night in the dark, out behind Brackenridge Hall, the men's dormitory where I lodged, I made a small bonfire of every scrap of my cowboy songs.[7]
But Lomax retained his romantic love of Texas and particularly cowboy literature. In January 1896, he published an article in the Texas University Magazine entitled "William Lawrence Chittenden-Poet Ranchman," to celebrate a popular cowboy poet. Lomax wrote, "All Texans should honor him as the faithful painter of a sphere of Texas life being fast supplanted by other industries."[8] Lomax's vision of a valid Texas literature, focused on the cowboy, had survived his early academic conflict.
When he was a visiting student at the Harvard Graduate School in English in 1906, Lomax's enthusiasm for cowboy songs caught the attention of professors Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge. The latter had studied under Francis James Child, whose collection of English and Scottish ballads was one of the largest folklore collections in existence. Kittredge had succeeded Child at Harvard and had taken over Child's classes, and later edited the Child Ballads. Kittredge proved to be a particularly strong influence in pushing Lomax toward collecting ballads. This influence led to the preparation of a circular that Lomax sent to the editors of nearly a thousand newspapers in the West. It was signed at the bottom by Kittredge and Wendell as a kind of academic stamp of approval. In it Lomax wrote:
I am endeavoring to make a complete collection of the native ballads and songs of the West. It will hardly be possible to secure such a selection except through the aid of the press; for many of these ballads have never been in print, but, like the Masonic ritual, are handed down from one generation to another by "word of mouth".... I wish to solicit your aid in preserving from extinction this expression of American literature. Eventually it is expected that the ballads will be published in book form. An editorial request from you to your readers for copies of frontier songs will doubtless result in valuable material.[9]
The circular was published, often as written by Lomax, in many of the periodicals that had received the request. Lomax described the response to this first circular as "immediate and surprising,"[10] and noted that the circular was reprinted even in Eastern newspapers and magazines and in small weeklies in rural areas. At the urging of Wendell and Kittredge, he applied for a Carnegie Foundation grant. In his application, he focused on the academic worth of a collection of cowboy songs, its potential for publication, its popularity (apparent in the number of responses to the circular), and the romantic aspects of the collection itself. Lomax wrote: "Judging from the hundreds of responses I received, I am convinced there are many and valuable folk songs, springing from distinctive Western experience and colored by Western phraseology, that have never been printed .... The old time Westerner has drifted to the frontier. Untutored, and perhaps suspicious, what he has to give can only be secured by personal contact.[11]
In terms of the songs' academic worth, he wrote: "The words of these songs must always interest both historians and sociologists." They were also, he argued, authentic folk music: a cowboy song "is a ballad as genuine, however crude and unpolished, as any from English and Scottish sources." And he colored his argument with romantic overtones: the songs "sprang from the unlettered imaginations of the frontiersman; they are redolent of the plains, the campfires, the mountains, the trail .... Much [of the music] reflects in its major character the loneliness, the bigness, the flat dreariness of the plains." Although his application would ultimately be rejected, Lomax clearly laid out his main concerns in the cowboy song project in this early attempt to "sell" the collection.
Lomax did obtain, with the assistance of Wendell and Kiftredge, two Sheldon fellowships from Harvard that enabled him to spend much of 1909 collecting songs in the West. At the same time, he began to discuss with publishers the idea of the collection's publication. In February of 1908, Wendell wrote Lomax, "Kittredge and I agree with you in thinking that the result of your researches would sell"[12] Within a year, the publishers Doubleday, Page and Co., and Appleton and Company were in contact with Lomax. He had written to Doubleday to see if they might be interested in a manuscript he had completed on George Meredith, the Victorian Age British poet and novelist, upon whom Lomax had written his master's thesis in 1906.
Doubleday's response was: "By all means send a chapter from your book on Meredith .... [However,] the work you contemplate with cowboy ballads is, of course, more appealing to us than Meredith. It seems to me you have a chance there to do something more worthwhile."[13] Both Appleton and Doubleday ultimately rejected his manuscript, but Sturgis and Walton, a slightly smaller New York firm, published it.[14] By 1910, the "ballad hunting" work had unearthed more than enough songs to fill a collection, and Lomax had successfully sold his work to a publisher. The first important step toward the collection's dissemination of the figure of the cowboy singer was complete.
In order to understand the success of Cowboy Songs, we must also understand its place within the development of the perception of the cowboy as a symbol and a myth. Historians mark the half century from 1870-1920 as the period in which the cowboy developed into a major cultural figure through exposure in the emerging mass media. William Goetzmann traces the beginning of the figure's popularity to the year 1869, when Buffalo Bill appeared in a dime novel written by Ned Buntline that was also serialized in The New York Weekly. [15] Dime novels, many of which featured the cowboy, began to rise in popularity following the Civil War.[16] By 1872, Buffalo Bill was performing in Chicago in the first staged Western, Scouts of the Prairie, and ten years later, the entity that would become the "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" show made its first appearance outside North Platte, Nebraska.
As the twentieth century began, the cowboy had become a national figure. In 1902, Owen Wister's The Virginian, the landmark Western novel that sold fifty thousand copies in its first two months of release, was published. In explaining the rise of the western novel at the turn of the century, Richard Etulain points to a number of important historical determinants that coincided during that period. These include the rise of tourism through the expansion and growth of the railroads, and the climate of the Progressive era, in which the West became a symbol for all that was being lost to the rise of industry and rampant capitalism. Etulain argues that these factors, in addition to such aesthetic developments as a revival of interest in the historical novel, the disappearance of the dime novel, and the ethos of the "strenuous age" of fiction exemplified by Jack London and Harold Bell Wright, worked to condition and, ultimately, overdetermine the rise of the Western novel and the cowboy figure in fiction.[17]
In addition to the Western novel, the image of the cowboy appeared in other forms. Theodore Roosevelt, who cast himself as a cowboy, was sworn into the presidency following McKinley's assassination in 1901. Frederic Remington, in the latter stages of his career as illustrator and painter of cowboys, in 1903 signed a contract with Collier's magazine that "acknolwedged him as the master illustrator of the old West."[18] In the same year, Edwin S. Porter filmed The Great Train Robbery, the first extended narrative motion picture and the first cinematic Western, and by 1909, Tom Mix's prolific career in films was beginning. Thus the first decade of the twentieth century saw the cowboy emerge as a central figure in the mass media.
Cowboy Songs appeared at the beginning of the next decade-one that would push the cowboy even further into the nation's consciousness, particularly through the increasing power of the film medium. But the growth of this figure was, seemingly, everywhere in evidence: the cowboy, as epitomized by public figures ranging from actors to presidents, burst forth from every modemrnfo rm of entertainment. Cowboy Songs worked well within this movement, successfully adding a musical dimension to it. The 1910 edition of Cowboy Songs had three sections of prose preceding the song texts, each one a kind of proclamation of different aspects of the book's intended appeal. At the outset the volume reproduced a handwritten note to Lomax from Theodore Roosevelt, whose presidential career had ended the year before. Lomax had met Roosevelt at the Frontier Celebration in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the summer before the book was published,[19] and the ex-president's very public
appearances as a cowboy added credence to the collection. The reader was, in a sense, witnessing a personal note from an ex-president to the book's author; by implication, this book must be important. The note began, "You have done a work emphatically worth doing and one which should appeal to the people of all our country, but particularly to the West and Southwest." Roosevelt discussed the historical importance of the growth of ballads in the West and closed with, "It is therefore a work of real importance to preserve permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the back country and the frontier."[20] The note underscored the historical and general importance of the work, an underscoring that was made more effective by Roosevelt's position and his personal certification of the book's historical and popular worth.
Sturgis and Walton, Cowboys Songs' publisher, desired that the formal introduction for the 1910 edition be written by Owen Wister, author of The Virginian and by that time a prominent figure in the growing field of cowboy mythology. Their expressed reasoning, that "Mr. Wister knows the cowboy and is also a composer and musician of no mean talent,[21] neglected to mention the obvious commercial impact that an association with Wister would have on any book concerning cowboys. Sturgis and Walton's second choice, and the ultimate author of the introduction, was Professor Barrett Wendell,[22] who was actually Lomax's first choice. His piece focused almost exclusively on the academic concerns raised by the collection. Wendell wrote, "In this collection of American ballads, almost if not quite uniquely, it is possible to trace the precise manner in which songs and cycles of song-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."[23] Wendell thus gave Cowboy Songs a kind of intellectual credence, certainly resulting in a different effect than that which would have been produced by an introduction written by Wister.
Lomax's "Collector's Note,' while emphasizing both the general historical and academic importance of his work, was intended to focus closely upon the mythical nature of the cowboy figure. This agenda became clear when he wrote that the cowboy songs "are interesting... particularly because of the information they contain concerning that unique and romantic figure in modern civilization, the American cowboy."[24]
Lomax claimed to be most interested in the historical aspects of cowboy songs, yet he emphasized their romantic elements when he wrote, "coming direct from the cowboy's experience, giving vent to his careless and tender emotions, [these songs] will afford future generations a true conception of what he really was."[25] The close of Lomax's introduction recapitulated the author's central concerns of the cowboy and his music, the idealized vision and historical importance of a vanishing figure of the great West:
The changing and romantic West of the early days lives mainly in story and song. The last figure to vanish is the cowboy, the animating spirit of a vanishing era. He sits on his horse easily as he rides through a wide valley, enclosed by mountains, clad in the hazy purple of coming night-with his face turned steadily down the long, long road, "the road that the sun goes down." A vagrant puff of wind shakes a corner of the crimson handkerchief knotted loosely at his throat; the thud of his pony's feet, mingling with the jingle of his spurs, is borne back; and as the careless, gracious, lovable figure disappears over the great divide, the breeze brings to the ears, faint and far yet cheery still, the refrain of a cowboy song... [26]
The song texts that constituted Cowboy Songs soon became a source of academic controversy. As Lomax wrote in the Collector's Note, his editorial process consisted of "selecting and putting together what seemed to be the best lines from different versions, all telling the same story. Frankly, the volume is meant to be popular."[27] Had he taken a scholarly approach toward his collection, he reasoned, the book would have lost much of its popular appeal. It is not the purpose of this article to judge the academic worth of these song texts, but it is interesting to note subsequent criticism of Lomax's method of collection and editing.
D. K. Wilgus, in his Anglo-American Folk Scholarship since 1898, offers an outline of Lomax's errors. These include the absence of any citation of sources; the relative absence of musical notation accompanying the lyrics (only eighteen of 122 songs have printed tunes); the fact that much of the material was obtained from printed sources and not through oral transmission as Lomax claimed; and Lomax's undocumented editing of his collected materials into freely synthesized ideal compositions. [28]
Another very important criticism concerns the unproven yet probable "borrowing" of songs from Thorp's earlier collection without proper attribution.[29] As Robert W. Gordon writes, Cowboy Songs "gives a marvelous panorama of cowboy song that no future collector is likely ever to surpass or even equal. But it is not accompanied by certain facts needed for the final interpretation of the precise relation between the songs and the folk:[30] Wilgus neatly summarizes this criticism of Lomax with, "[His] selection of the material emphasizes the romantic concept of the cowboy that was growing in the minds of the public."[31] This may indeed have been Lomax's intention for his collection from the beginning.
Lomax claimed in his autobiography that "early reviews of Cowboy Songs were none too flattering or numerous,"[32] but, in fact, many good reviews of his book appeared. In an advertising circular published in 1911, Lomax quoted from very positive reactions in The Houston Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The St. Louis Dispatch. The New York Times published a favorable review in February, 1911, and the more scholarly periodical The Dial, published in Chicago, called the book an "interesting and valuable volume."[33] If anyone would have been aware of these positive responses it would have been Lomax; as his collected papers prove, he studiously clipped reviews and, later in his career, subscribed to clippings services.
The most effective promotion the book received was from the 1911 advertising circular, the 1907 circular soliciting songs that was reprinted in periodicals all over the country, and the reviews. Word of the book spread; by November, 1911, Lomax was receiving requests for the book from Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Kansas, as well as other parts of the country. Cowboy Songs even received attention in England when it was released there in early 1912.[34]
Cowboy Songs was meant for a popular audience. The collection's prefatory notes, ranging from Roosevelt's populism to Wendell's academic concerns, expressed the different aspects of the book's appeal. But it was Lomax who had the final and longest word, and it was Lomax who appealed to the reader who was beginning to recognize and appreciate the emerging popular figure of the cowboy. The book was successful: although it did not get the kind of attention and critical response that Lomax's subsequent efforts would receive, Cowboy Songs proved popular enough to go through four printings before a second edition was published in 1916. It has continued to appear in newer editions until its most recent rebirth in 1986.
The most direct effect of the release of Cowboy Songs was to bring John A. Lomax to national attention, both in academic and popular circles. Lomax's academic background at Harvard under Kittredge and Wendell, as well as his lecture tours and the publicity gained from them, helped lead to his nomination as President of the American Folklore Society in 1912. And through the publication of his circular in periodicals throughout the country, his name became associated nationally with folksong collecting in general and cowboy song collecting specifically. His rewards were financial as well; as he wrote in his autobiography, "My first royalty check was half my annual salary."[35]
Lomax's wife Bess, who assisted him in collecting and in his lectures, wrote him in early 1917, "It is worth considering that you and I, by devoting our energies beyond the needs of earning and living to a fixed purpose, can undoubtedly put your name along besides [sic] that of Child in the field that seems to be pretty well surrendered to you."[36] Lomax was fast rising to the position of prominence that he would ultimately achieve, and his lecture tours became an important part of this rise. His reasons for lecturing, as they emerge from his correspondence, were to promote his work and to obtain more songs from his audiences. In arranging his first tour he wrote to Professor Albert G. Reed of Louisiana State University that he planned to "make a lecture to advertise my ballad collection work. College audiences, as a rule, help me to [find] new material, and they are a universally interested and responsive audience"[37] He was also paid for his lectures, though this was not a crucial issue for him at this point in his career. In a letter soliciting a lecture appointment, he wrote, "If, however, there is no available lecture fund, I shall be glad to find an audience some of whom I may be able to interest permanently in the work I am doing." [38]
In 1911 Lomax conducted his first lecture tour. He had prepared two talks, one on cowboy songs and one on "The Ballad of the Boll Weevil" The tour took him to fourteen campuses east of the Mississippi, including Harvard University, where he also addressed the Modem Language Association conference.[39] The lectures themselves have not survived, but we can get some idea of what they included from Lomax's correspondence. He wrote to John L. Senior of New York in 1912,
My lecture is an attempt to use the songs of the cowboy to illustrate his expressions and the things he thought and talked about. The comment is liberally interspersed with selections from the verses of the Cowboy songs, and specimen [sic] of Cowboy lingo. Under sufficient pressure, I sometimes give illustrations of Cowboy singing. There is little technical discussion in the lecture, but enough I hope to satisfy the scholarly element in your audience. The lecture is mainly an attempt to show the real Cowboy is reflected in the songs that he made and sung about himself.[40]
The performance component of the lecture is particularly interesting in light of the contents of a letter Lomax sent to a Cornell professor in preparing for a lecture on the first tour: "If five of your students could find some suitable toggery, and drift in about the speaker's stand unexpectedly to the audience about the close of the talk, and then render two or three of the most stirring of the cowboy songs, I think it would make an effective and not too undignified finale to the occasion. In twenty minutes practice I think I could indicate to them the particular twang with which the songs are rendered in the open."[41]
This seems to have been a regular practice on the tour, as he sent an almost identical letter to a Yale professor.[42] Lomax was, as James McNutt describes him, a raconteur and showman,[43] and though he made bows toward academia, his concern in his lectures was more to popularize the cowboy's songs. Response to his lectures was positive and they were apparently enjoyed by both students and the general public. Professor "Billy" Phelps continually invited Lomax back to Yale, and Lomax regularly made lecture tours until he left the University of Texas in 1917, where he had returned after he left Harvard in 1910.44 His MLA conference lecture "was greeted with a startled clapping of hands" after his traditional finale, in which he sung "the little dogies" of the trail to sleep.[45]
The University Daily Kansan at the University of Kansas wrote in 1912 that Lomax's recitation of cowboy songs was performed "with such naturalness and feeling that the audience of students were [sic] complete [sic] carried away."[46] A Lewiston, Maine, newspaper wrote that "the real character of the cowboy as revealed in the songs he has created was brought out in an entertaining lecture by Professor John A. Lomax last night."[47]
By 1914, a Boston entertainment and lecture agency was scheduling Lomax's tours and had produced an advertising circular for "The Songs of the Cowboy and Other Lectures on American Balladry by John A. Lomax, President of the American Folklore Society."[48] The circular described the main lecture as "reflecting the picturesque existence of a rapidly vanishing type [and] delivered with a human interest and dramatic appeal only possible to one who spent his boyhood by the side of the old Chisholm trail."[49]
In addition to this rather romanticized vision of the subject matter and the speaker, the advertising circular featured numerous "personal letters-a journal of two successful lecture tours;" with testimonials from academics whom Lomax had solicited to write about his performances. A typical example is one from Professor Frederick Tupper, Jr., of the University of Vermont, who wrote that Lomax's lecture "made such a delightful impression;' that he and his students had been humming the cowboy tunes and repeating cowboy phrases to each other.[50]
By using such letters, the advertising circular emphasized the entertainment aspect of Lomax's lecture within the context of Lomax's academic background. And in so framing the lectures, the circular created an image of them that paralleled that of the book-an "academic" enterprise that was "meant to be popular" Lomax's lecture tours took him all over the South and East, spreading the word of the cowboy and Cowboy Songs. The audiences, often unfamiliar with the subject, were thus exposed to Lomax, the book, and the romantic figure of the cowboy singer. By 1924, only a year before the commercial cowboy singer would become nationally successful, Lomax had toured widely enough to confidently write to Pierce Butler of Tulane University that Tulane was "about the only leading university in the country that has not heard my story of the songs"[51] Through his popular lectures, Lomax's Cowboy Songs and the figure of the singing cowboy were brought to public awareness, thus informing and preparing future audiences for the commercial cowboy singers who would begin to appear during the 1920s.
Cowboy Songs and the work that surrounded it directly affected the repertoire and careers of the early popular singing cowboys, who became known through recordings and radio broadcasts. As I discuss below, the cinematic singing cowboy of the 1930s and 1940s, as personified by Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, was in no way a direct descendant of the cowboy figure described by Lomax; between the original Cowboy Songs and Rogers and Autry were too many years, too many other singing cowboys, and too many changes in both the media and the media's content. But Lomax emerges as an important indirect historical influence on the singing cowboys of the screen because his work, though not the first, familiarized a growing public with certain types of cowboy songs and the romantic image of the cowboy who sang them.
The first recording of a cowboy song is attributed to Bentley Ball, who in 1919 departed momentarily from his usual patriotic and traditional repertoire to record Cowboy Songs' "The Dying Cowboy" and "Jesse James" for Columbia records. These recordings acknowledged the Lomax collection as the source for the songs and Columbia paid Lomax copyright fees.[52] But it was Carl T. Sprague, often dubbed "The Original Singing Cowboy;" who had the first real commercial success with a cowboy song. Sprague had grown up on a ranch outside Houston, where he and his family had sat around campfires at roundup singing the old songs of the range. He later supplemented his repertoire with selections from Cowboy Songs, a copy of which he used to carry in his guitar case.[53] Following Vernon Dalhart's early success as a country music performer, Sprague recorded "When Work's All Done This Fall"--a version of which had originally appeared in Cowboy Songs-- in September, 1925. The record went on to sell nearly 900,000 copies.[54]
Sprague ultimately recorded twenty-eight songs, most of which were traditional cowboy pieces, many first collected in Cowboy Songs. The material for his recordings was not necessarily taken verbatim from Lomax's collection. Instead, he used his copy of the book as a place to inscribe his own variants or make note of others that he had encountered. Thus Sprague, who helped to spawn an entire subgenre of the cowboy singer within the country genre, as well as other early country music entertainers like Bentley Ball, were influenced by and recorded the songs of Lomax's collection.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, many singers were recording cowboy songs, with some performers limiting themselves entirely to the genre. Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock, former singer for the Industrial Workers of the World and author of the songs "Hallelujah, Bum Again" and "Big Rock Candy Mountain;' became a radio cowboy during this time. Between 1927 and 1931 he recorded a number of songs including "Sam Bass" and "Jesse James,' both of which had appeared in Lomax's collection.[55]
One cowboy singer who was particularly influenced by Cowboy Songs was John I. White, the first singer to introduce cowboy songs to a New York audience. White, from Washington, D.C., visited his brother's ranch in Arizona in 1924, where he met and spent time with a neighboring rancher. He later wrote: "As we sat around the corral or in the shade of the mesquite trees, we amused each other by trading ballads. [The neighbor] introduced us to a dog-eared copy of the first John A. Lomax anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Greatly impressed, I purchased one at the earliest opportunity. I also resolved to acquire a guitar the minute I returned home."[56]
White was also a historian whose work provides an important chronicle of the development of certain popular cowboy songs. He also traced the influence of Cowboy Songs on the early commercial cowboy singers. According to White's research, cowboys had been singing the song "Whoopie To Yi Yo" (or, as White refers to it, "Git Along, Little Dogies") since at least the 1890s, but it was not until the publication of Cowboy Songs that it was, in White's words, made "available to the general public." And by the 1920s, as radio cowboys grew in number and influence and included the song as part of their repertoire, it became among the best known of the traditional cowboy songs.[57]
"Home on the Range;' which dated back to at least 1867, also reached the general public through Cowboy Songs. It would later become extremely popular with early cowboy singers and fans through recordings by Vernon Dalhart in 1927 and Jules Verne Allen in 1928, and numerous others in the 1930s.[58]
When the movie cowboy began to sing, the cowboy song and the style in which it was sung began to change, moving farther away from the songs and styles associated with the "real" cowboy. This new cowboy arose from a series of developments, not the least of which was the technological advancement of sound films, beginning with Al Jolson's Jazz Singer in 1927. Yet the move toward adding the singing cowboy to the already popular genre did not occur instantaneously.
The beginning of the change can be found in Ken Maynard's films of the early 1930s, in which Maynard sang, hummed, and played various instruments along with the soundtrack. These films were a "harbinger of all that followed,' but according to film historians George F. Fenin and William K. Everson, they remained only a "precursor .... Perhaps due to Maynard's own limitations as a singer and the fact that [his films] still adhered to the traditional Western, the idea for the musical Western did not catch on at that time."[59] The fact that Maynard's vocals, rough and slightly off-key, were more in keeping with the radio cowboys of his time may also account for the gap between his films and the actual musical Westerns that were to follow. Significantly, Maynard's two recordings on a Columbia Records label in 1930, "Cowboy's Lament" and "Lone Star Trail," had both appeared in the Lomax collection. Thus, Maynard's ties to the radio cowboys and their influences, both soon to be supplanted in the coming years by the movie cowboys, were important elements in his ultimate failure as a cinematic singing
cowboy.
Maynard's main contribution to the musical Western was in introducing Gene Autry, by then a relatively popular radio cowboy and recording star, to the screen. Beginning as an imitator of Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakeman who was the first true country music "star," Autry had quickly developed his own style and identity as "The Oklahoma Singing Cowboy" on the National Barn Dance in Chicago in 1931.[60] From there he successfully talked his way into an acting job in Hollywood and on to the set of the 1934 Maynard film, In Old Santa Fe. Autry's performance in that film proved so popular that he was immediately put into a starring role in a serial. Within a year he was starring in his first feature, Tumbling Tumbleweeds. By 1936 he was voted the third most popular Western star, and by the next year, he had reached the top position.[61] He owed little to the traditions and conventions of the traditional Western of that era. As Douglas B. Green writes, when Autry appeared, "fresh and free of the expectations of the past, then and there a new genre, both in music and in film, was born."[62] And according to film historian Jon Tuska, "Gene Autry, in his magnificent outfits, yodeling a pop tune, is an image as far removed from the actual man of the frontier as to rival any fairy tale."[63]
Similary, Autry's music strayed from the roots of the "authentic" cowboy and the authentic sounding radio cowboy toward a style that proved more commercially successful on a national scale. But this did not occur immediately; instead, the evolution of Autry's music displays the pattern of the development of the cowboy singer and his songs. Rhythm of the Range (1933), an early song booklet on which Autry is listed as "author," contains a short and romantic history of cowboy songs and a number of traditional songs, many originally collected by Lomax. Significantly, the letter from Teddy Roosevelt to John Lomax that was printed in the beginning of Cowboy Songs is mentioned in the booklet's history section, and Lomax is referred to as an "authority" on the songs of the cowboy. Whether Autry wrote this history or not is relatively unimportant; what is important is that the author considered Lomax, his book, and the history of "traditional" cowboy songs to be important enough to be cited along with the words and music of traditional songs.
Within a few years, however, Autry's songbooks would almost exclusively feature original songs, with the exception of the occasional standard like "Home on the Range."[64] This reflected the fact that as cowboy songs became more popular and profitable, artists like Autry began to write their own material or to rely on more recently composed music. Similar trends were taking place with southeastern "hillbilly" artists like Jimmie Rodgers. Ralph Peer, the RCA executive who had "discovered" and produced Rodgers's recordings, encouraged him and other artists to write their own material. Peer said in retrospect, "By insisting on new material and leaning towards artists who could produce their own compositions for us, that created [sic] the so-called hillbilly business."[65]
This practice also widened the gulf between newer artists and more traditional ones. In not relying on sources like Cowboy Songs and on "real" cowboy stylists like Carl T. Sprague, Gene Autry and the new generation of singing cowboys developed a style distinct from that of their predecessors. Whereas earlier songs had concentrated on the rough and lonely life of the cowboy, the more modern songs, as personified by the work of songwriters and performers such as Autry and Bob Nolan of the Sons of the Pioneers, focused on the beauty of the Western landscape and the more general romantic notion of Western life. The exception that proves the rule was "Home on the Range,' a traditional cowboy song that proved immensely popular in the 1930s precisely because it fit this period's developing conventions. And when Tin Pan Alley songwriters began to contribute to the repertoires of stars like Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy figure strayed even further from its traditional roots.
As the songs changed, so did the singers and their styles. As the musical Western proved commercially successful, a larger national audience began following the music of the singing cowboy, and the singing styles of the performers gradually became smoother, less rural and closer to the conventions of mainstream popular music. The stakes were higher: instead of a cowboy strumming his guitar in front of a campfire for friends, or a local radio personality playing cowboy songs for a community, Gene Autry was singing on screen and on recordings for hundreds of thousands of fans. And as the United States began the shift toward an urban, industrialized society, the pure rustic cowboy, warts and all, could not have successfully conquered the mass media in the manner of Autry and Rogers.[66]
To listen to a number of cowboy song recordings is to understand this transition. For example, Mac McClintocks' "The Old Chisholm Trail" (1928) and Carl T. Sprague's version of D. J. O'Malley's 1893 "When the Work's All Done This Fall" (1925)- "traditional" versions of relatively traditional songs, both collected in Cowboy Songs -feature sparse intrumentation (guitar and fiddle on the former, guitar alone on the latter) and relatively simple vocal stylings. The lyrics emphasize the routines, rituals, and homespun stories of the cowboy, and are relatively unstructured, rambling tales. Only a little more than a decade later, Gene Autry's "Back in the Saddle Again" (1939) and the Sons of the Pioneers's "Cool Water" (1941) show the transition to fuller arrangements, smooth vocal harmonies and a generally commercial style. The lyrics are tightly structured romantic narrations of the cowboy's heroic life in the mythical West, displaying the movement away from the traditional songs' vision of the more difficult-though also romanticized-life of the "real" cowboy.
This sense that both the more traditional early cowboy singers and the movie stars sang of a romanticized West is crucial. Ultimately, Autry, Rogers, Tex Ritter and the other singing cowboys were not radically different from those who had come before. Though the styles had changed, the music and personae of the cinematic singing cowboys emanated from a common source-a romantic vision of the cowboy and his life. It is this symbol that was being developed in the period following the Civil War, and it is this symbol that John Lomax emphasized in his collection.
Lomax consciously romanticized the cowboy and his music in an attempt to provide the public of 1910 with what he considered to be a vital form of entertainment. More than two decades later, Autry and others who copied his method (consciously or unconsciously), further updated the image and the music in order to appeal to larger audiences. Although the figure and the music changed, at the core of these songs was the romantic conception of the singing cowboy, first disseminated and made popular by John Lomax.
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NOTES
1. J. Frank Dobie, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1953), 120.
2. Thorp had a press run of 2,000 unbound copies, few of which have survived. See his "Banjo in the Cow Camps," Atlantic Monthly 67:2 (Aug. 1940): 195-203. Its classification as both collection and broadside is from D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 164.
3. Owen Wister, The Virginian (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 4.
4. John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910), xxi.
5. John A. Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 17-19.
6. Austin Fife, introduction to John I. White's Git Along Little Dogies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), xi.
7. John A. Lomax, Adventures, 31-32.
8. John A. Lomax, "William Lawrence Chittenden-Poet Ranchman," Texas University Magazine 11 (Jan. 1896), 117. James McNutt discusses this article more fully, seeing it as particularly symptomatic of Lomax's early regionalist view of Texas literature. McNutt's work on the Lomax papers proved particularly helpful to me in my research, and although our work overlaps at points, our focuses and arguments differ. See James C. McNutt, Beyond Regionalism: Texas Folklorists and the Emergence of a Post-Regional Consciousness, (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1982), 121-46.
9. John A. Lomax, Circular, Apr. 12, 1907, Lomax Papers, Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin, hereinafter referred to as Lomax Papers.
10. John A. Lomax, Adventures, 35.
11. John A. Lomax, letter to Carnegie Foundation, Jan. 14, 1908, Lomax Papers.
12. Barrett Wendell, letter to John A. Lomax, Feb. 15, 1908, Lomax Papers.
13. Harry Steger, letter to John A. Lomax, Feb. 25, 1909, Lomax Papers.
14. In his autobiography, Lomax described Sturgis and Walton as "a couple of New Yorkers who possessed more nerve than capital" (Adventures, 77).
15. William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, West of the Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 288.
16. Warren French, "The Cowboy in the Dime Novel;' Texas Studies in English 30 (1951): 219-34.
17. Richard W. Etulain, "Origins of the Western;' in Critical Essays on the Western Historical Novel, ed. William T. Pilkington (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 56-60. 18. Goetzmann and Goetzmann, West of the Imagination, 254.
19. Lomax, Adventures, 68-69.
20. Theodore Roosevelt, prefatory note to John A. Lomax, Cowboys Songs (1910), vii, V1i.
21. Sturgis and Walton to John A. Lomax, Apr. 19, 1909, Lomax Papers.
22. Sturgis and Walton to John A. Lomax, Dec. 3, 1909, Lomax Papers.
23. Barrett Wendell, introduction to Cowboy Songs (1910), xiv.
24. John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs (1910), xvii.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., xxiii.
27. Ibid.
28. Wilgus, Anglo-American, 160-64.
29. See, in particular, John O. West, "Jack Thorp and John Lomax: Oral or Written Transmission?', Western Folklore 26:2 (Apr. 1967): 113-18. 30. Robert Winslow Gordon, Folk-Songs of America (New York: National Service Bureau, Publication No. 73-S, 1938), 102.
31. Wilgus, Anglo-American, 159.
32. John A. Lomax, Adventures, 80.
33. Albert H. Tolman, "American Folksongs,' The Dial (Apr. 1, 1911), 263.
34. Positive reviews appeared in the London Daily News (Jan. 22, 1912) and Mainly About Books of Feb. 1912; a negative review appeared in The Academy (Feb. 4, 1912). In general, the popular English press (particularly newspapers) seemed to praise the book, while more scholarly journals used the book as an excuse to denigrate American folk culture and its scholarship.
35. John A. Lomax, Adventures, 77.
36. Bess Brown to John A. Lomax, Jan. 20, 1917, Lomax Papers.
37. John A. Lomax to Albert G. Reed, Feb. 6, 1911, Lomax Papers.
38. John A. Lomax to President D. H. Hill of North Carolina A&M, Mar. 4, 1911, Lomax Papers.
39. These included three universities in Kentucky, two in North Carolina, the University of Vermont, Columbia, Yale, and Cornell Universities (University of Texas Record 11 [July 8, 1911]: 62-63).
40. John A. Lomax to John L. Senior, Feb. 5, 1912, Lomax Papers.
41. John A. Lomax to Professor W. Strunk, Jr., Mar. 11, 1911, Lomax Papers.
42. John A. Lomax to William Lyon Phelps, Mar. 11, 1911, Lomax Papers.
43. McNutt, Beyond Regionalism, 132-34.
44. Ibid., 133.
45. Lomax, Adventures, 83.
46. "Cowboy Song Lecture,' University Daily Kansan, Mar. 8, 1912, 1.
47. Unidentified newspaper, Jan. 18, 1916.
48. "The Songs of the Cowboy" Lecture Circular, prepared by The Players Agency, Boston, Massachusetts, 1913. Lomax Papers.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. John A. Lomax to Pierce Butler, Feb. 9, 1924, Lomax Papers.
52. Bill C. Malone, Country Music USA (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 139.
53. Norm Cohen, "Early Pioneers;" in Stars of Country Music, ed. Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 37.
54. Ibid.
55. Malone, Country Music USA, 140.
56. John I. White, Git Along Little Dogies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 2.
57. Ibid., 16-26.
58. Ibid., 153-65; and John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Folk Song U.S.A. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947), 198.
59. George F. Fenin and William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to the Seventies (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), 176.
60. Green, "The Singing Cowboy;' 14-15.
61. Douglas B. Green, "Gene Autry," in Stars of Country Music, 158-59.
62. Douglas B. Green, "The Singing Cowboy: An American Dream;' Journal of Country Music 8:(May 1978): 8.
63. Jon Tuska, The Filming of the West (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 305.
64. See, for example, Gene Autry, Cowboy Songs and Mountain Ballads (Chicago: M. M. Cole Publishing Co., 1935), and Songs Gene Autry Sings (Hollywood: Westr'n Music Publishing, 1942).
65. Quoted in Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America's Blue Yodeler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 99.
66. For an extension of this line of argument, see Thomas E Johnson, "That Ain't Country: The Distinctiveness of Commercial Western Music;' John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly 17: 62 (Summer 1981): 78.