Jack Thorp and John Lomax: Oral or Written Transmission?
by John O. West
Western Folklore, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), pp. 113-118
Jack Thorp and John Lomax: Oral or Written Transmission?
JOHN O. WEST
THE NAME OF John A. Lomax is familiar to folklorists everywhere, as well as to hosts of nonscholars interested in folk music. He is widely known as one of the most important of the collectors of American folksong-with emphasis on the songs of the American cowboy. His collection-on wax cylinders and aluminum discs-forms an important part of the folksong archives in the Library of Congress. The many books published by John Lomax and his son Alan, both individually and jointly, are vital to any library that tries to be complete in the area of American folksong.
John Lomax was a pioneer in his field, collecting traditional song when it was not fashionable nor easy to do so. He collected long before the portable transistorized recorder was developed, in a time when virtually no grants were available. The story of his early experiences, as he recounts them, is indeed fascinating.[1] But, in spite of his prominence in the field of folksong collecting, John Lomax is not always held up as a model for budding folklorists today.
To begin with, he printed relatively few tunes in his first editions of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Perhaps he can be forgiven here, on two counts: first, few of the early collectors considered tunes important; second, the publishing of music added considerably to the cost of producing a book in the days before offset printing. John Lomax is also frowned on, as Bishop Percy was, for "doctoring" the songs he collected. For instance, among the Lomax papers in the University of Texas Archives is a typescript of one text of "Root Hog or Die" in which words and whole lines have been substituted in pencil in Mr. Lomax's handwriting. The altered song has been published many times, as recently as Alan Lomax's 1960 Folk Songs of North America, and never has any indication been given how extensively the song had been edited-to use a mild word. The original is broadly vulgar; the published version does not even mildly suggest that the title phrase has anything to do with sex of the violent sort.
But critics must bear in mind that the public that John Lomax was trying to educate-and the few people who might have been interested in giving financial support to his collecting ventures-would hardly have welcomed the American cowboy song in its natural state of undress. Compared to the originals of "Root Hog or Die," "Bucking Broncho," and a host of others, "Mademoiselle from Armentieres" is almost suitable for Sunday School socials! Mr. Lomax did what he had to do; one regrets, however, that he left no clear record of his fumigations for others to relish.
A third complaint against Mr. Lomax as a folklorist concerns his claim presented in 1910 and reprinted many times thereafter-that his cowboy songs were taken down primarily from oral presentation and that they had never before been in print.[2] The truth is that nineteen of the cowboy songs Lomax printed in 1910 had been published two years before, by an educated cowboy named Jack Thorp. When Jack Thorp published his little book of cowboy songs in 1908, he did what no one had done before him. A few cowboy songs had been published in Stanley Clark's 1897 Life and Adventures of the American Cow-Boy (along with assorted advertisements for Snake Oil), but Thorp was the first to publish in book form a collection consisting solely of range verse-the majority of it authentic folk material.[3]
Mr. Thorp paid P. A. Speckman of the News Print Shop, Estancia, New Mexico, six cents apiece for two thousand copies, "printed on rough stock and bound in red paper." He gave some away to his friends, and sold "quite a few" at fifty cents a copy to folks at roundups and cow-country gatherings. The printed result was modest-twenty-three songs and fifty pages, counting the cover-but he had been collecting for twenty years. His reminiscences in Pardner of the Wind, which he wrote with Neil M. Clark, tell of his growing interest in the cowboy's songs, starting soon after he came West.[4]
Jack Thorp (Nathan Howard Thorp was his "real" name) was an adopted westerner who spent his boyhood in the East. Born in New York City on June 10, 1867, to wealthy parents, young Jack had the advantages of fashionable schooling in New Hampshire and summers at Newport. In his teens, family business reverses set him on his own, and he found his future in the West, mainly in New Mexico. He worked as a civil engineer, trained polo ponies, eventually went into ranching, and fell in love with the open range. From then on he lived and ranched in the West, writing stories and verses about the land he called home, until his death in 1940.
This love of the West came out clearly in Mr. Thorp's own songs, which swell with the flavor of the cattle camp. "Little Joe the Wrangler," his best-known composition, is a western classic that has been sung from memory, in the true oral tradition, by many thousands of people in the half-century since he first published it.
The career of "Little Joe" is an interesting one. Thorp wrote the song, he said, about a real "Texas stray" who lost his life on a trail drive in which Thorp himself took part. Written to fit the tune of "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane," the sing was sung around campfires for ten years before Songs of the Cowboys came out.[5] When John Lomax published his first book, in 1910, "Little Joe the Wrangler" was included, slightly altered. For instance, the original line "You never in your life had seen before" appeared with a less grammatical but better-rhyming "Never in your life before had saw"-to match "Chaw," the pony's name. When Thorp republished the song in his revised edition of Songs of the Cowboys in 1921, he ignored the Lomax rendering-except that in Joe's death "his spur had rung the knell," the Lomax reading, replaced Thorp's original line, "his horse had rung the knell."
Admittedly, John Lomax could have heard versions of the song from cowboys; he collected in the same country where Thorp ranched and sang. Professor Wilgus has found evidence in support of this view among the Lomax papers.[6] But one clue-in another song printed by both-suggests strongly that Lomax used Thorp's earlier book without mentioning it. In 1908 Jack Thorp had printed in good faith "The Cowboy's Christmas Ball" as a true product of the range. He got it "from Miss Jessie Forbes, at Eddy, New Mexico, in 1898," only later finding out its true author, Larry Chittenden.[7] A comparison of Thorp's version with the original (in Ranch Verses, [New York: Putnam, 1893]) shows that, apparently, someone along the line had memorized the poem and garbled parts of it. One striking example, "the candles flickered festious," was originally a phrase a cowpoke would have considered "hi-falootin' "-"the candles flickered frescoes." And the Lomax version made the same confusion-even in the 1919 edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in which Lomax acknowledges Chittenden as the poem's author. The word "frescoes" could understandably cause the cowboy singer some trouble, but it hardly seems likely that of all the many possible substitutions or confusions of the word, Lomax would stumble upon the identical choice that Thorp had found.
John Lomax eventually printed all but four of the songs Jack Thorp had published (one that was omitted had a byline on it in the 1908 Thorp work). Although the Lomax versions show frequent variation and occasional change of title, one is forced to wonder if the "very learned professor" (as Thorp called Lomax)[8] did not, indeed, have the help of the earlier publication. But the matter is still not quite clear, partly because of a statement by Lomax himself. In 1919, John Lomax published another book of range materials, mostly by known authors, under the title Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp.[9]
In introducing the work he made a comment that is worth scrutiny: The volume is in reality a by-product of my earlier collection, "CowboyS ongs and Other Frontier Ballads." In the former book I put together what seemed to me the best of the songs created and sung by the cowboys as they went about their work. In making the collection, the cowboys often sang or sent to me songs which I recognized as having already been in print; although the singer usually said that some other cowboy had sung the song to him and that he did not know where it had originated. For example, one night in New Mexico a cowboy sang to me, in typical cowboy music, Larry Chittenden's entire "Cowboys Christmas Ball"; since that time the poem has often come to me in manuscript as an original cowboy song.[10]
This statement muddies the waters considerably. Did Lomax acquire Thorp's version of the "Cowboys' Christmas Ball" from the singing of someone who had learned it from Thorp? Or had the same singer been responsible for two independent collectings of the same variant of the song? The nearidentity of the two printings, including the confusion of "festious" for "frescoes," makes one believe that a printed copy-from Thorp-served Mr. Lomax directly.
Another song of interest is "Bucking Broncho." Thorp believed it was written by Belle Starr, the outlaw queen, and said that he had to "dryclean" it carefully to keep it from scorching the page. Further, he claimed that everyone who printed the song after him had used his expurgated version.[11] One cannot know what state Thorp found the song in originally, but, judging by a copy in the Lomax papers, it was strongly suggestive, to say the least. The symbolism of the bucking broncho and the cowboy's gun is almost as clearly sexual as the words of "Ring Dang Doo." Yet it is interesting to note that despite the still unsanitized copy in the Lomax papers, the song as printed in the 1919 edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads is identical with Thorp's- word for word and abbreviation for abbreviation- except that Lomax printed two more verses than Thorp.
One of these deserves quoting for its graphic imagery and erotic symbolism:
My love has a gun which has gone to the bad,
Which makes poor old Jimmy feel pretty damn sad;
For the gun it shoots high and the gun it shoots low,
And it wobbles about like a bucking broncho.[12]
If that verse has been sanitized, the original must really have been something! In view of the near-identity of these two printings of the "Bucking Broncho," Lomax's comment condemning Thorp is quite puzzling; in a letter cited by D. K. Wilgus, Lomax said:
Thorp's book ... is largely cribbed from mine with a lot of so-called songs to which he signs himself as author. I ... find that he has no really good cowboy song that has not hitherto been published in my collection.[13]
But Mr. Lomax was writing in 1923, following the reissue of Thorp-not in 1910, when the cribbing would have had to be in the opposite direction! One final example of duplication deserves our attention. In Thorp's printing venture in 1908, a minor tragedy occurred: the printer somehow omitted the final stanzas of a song called "Speckles." [14] In 1910, the song turned up in Lomax's book with the title "Freckles-A Fragment." A fragment it was, since the printed portion had set the stage for an adventure aboard a valiant horse-but the adventure did not appear. The whole story remained untold until Thorp reissued his Songs of the Cowboys in enlarged edition in 1921.
But the reissue, as in the case of "Little Joe the Wrangler," reveals some reverse influence: Lomax's title, "Freckles," was actually more appropriate to the song as originally printed, since (perhaps through printer's error) the celebrated horse was twice called Freckles in the Thorp version of 1908, and only the title used the name Speckles. But in the reprinting in 1921, Thorp apparently realized that Lomax's change had been a natural one and rectified the original error to read Speckles throughout. Whatever the horse's name should have been, the Lomax version is clearly derived from Thorp, directly or indirectly.
A jury evaluating this evidence would have a difficult time agreeing beyond a reasonable doubt that John Lomax ever saw a copy of the little book Jack Thorp published in 1908. Almost no piece that Thorp published turned up in precisely the same form in Lomax's printing-words, phrases, punctuation, and even titles were different in Lomax's versions. Moreover, the differences are often of the nature one would expect from the variety almost always found in oral transmission. "Little Joe the Wrangler" and "Speckles"-or "Freckles"-and others of Thorp's own compositions may indeed have been collected from oral tradition or sent to Lomax by ranch hands who knew of the professor's interest in the songs of the range. But, as some philosopher once pointed out, it takes three posts to make a row-and there are at least three posts here.
John Lomax is known to have "doctored" what he collected, whether for purposes of sanitation or quaintness; hence, identical printings would not be expected even in a derivative work. The fragmentary form of "Freckles" in both of the early printings suggests close coincidence, if not copywork. Nineteen songs out of twenty-three, just happening to be reprinted, is a strain for the most credulous. The fact that recent Lomax publications have not included "Freckles-" or even "Little Joe the Wrangler," which has certainly entered the oral tradition- makes one wonder mightily. The exact duplication of five verses of "Bucking Broncho" is highly inconsistent with the processes of oral transmission-and even with the usual methodology of John Lomax! And finally, it is inconceivable that the gods of chance-in two years or two thousand-would twice let down the bars and allow candles to flicker festious!
Texas Western College
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Footnotes:
1. John A. Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York: 1947).
2 Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: 1919) reprints the 1910 "Collector's
Note" (unpaginated) which contains this claim.
3 J. Frank Dobie, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (Dallas: 1952), p. 120.
4 (Caldwell, Idaho: 1945), pp. 13-45; the balance of the biographical information is taken
from this work. Thorp's original Songs of the Cowboys is now quite rare; one copy is available
in the Barker Center Library, University of Texas.
5 Ibid., p. 16.
6. D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898 (New Brunswick, N.J.: 1959), p. 165.
7 N. Howard Thorp, Songs of the Cowboys (Boston: 1921), p. 35.
8 Thorp and Clark, op cit., p. 42.
9 (New York: 1947 and 1950).
10 Ibid., pp. xi-xii.
11. Thorp and Clark, op. cit., pp. 35, 41-42.
12. Lomax, Cowboy Songs, p. 368.
13. Wilgus, op. cit., p. 165.
14. Thorp and Clark, op. cit., p. 42.