Cowboy Songs, and Other Frontier Ballads

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Various. Cowboy Songs, and Other Frontier Ballads

INTRODUCTION

COLLECTOR'S NOTE

THE DYING COWBOY1

THE DAYS OF FORTY-NINE

JOE BOWERS

THE COWBOY'S DREAM2

THE COWBOY'S LIFE3

THE KANSAS LINE

THE COWMAN'S PRAYER

THE MINER'S SONG4

JESSE JAMES

POOR LONESOME COWBOY

BUENA VISTA BATTLEFIELD

WESTWARD HO

A HOME ON THE RANGE

TEXAS RANGERS

THE MORMON BISHOP'S LAMENT

DAN TAYLOR

WHEN WORK IS DONE THIS FALL

SIOUX INDIANS

THE OLD CHISHOLM TRAIL

JACK DONAHOO

UTAH CARROLL

THE BULL-WHACKER

THE "METIS" SONG OF THE BUFFALO HUNTERS

THE COWBOY'S LAMENT

LOVE IN DISGUISE

MUSTANG GRAY

YOUNG COMPANIONS

LACKEY BILL

WHOOPEE TI YI YO, GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES

THE U-S-U RANGE

I'M A GOOD OLD REBEL

THE COWBOY

BILL PETERS, THE STAGE DRIVER

HARD TIMES

COLE YOUNGER

MISSISSIPPI GIRLS

THE OLD MAN UNDER THE HILL

JERRY, GO ILE THAT CAR

JOHN GARNER'S TRAIL HERD

THE OLD SCOUT'S LAMENT

THE LONE BUFFALO HUNTER

THE CROOKED TRAIL TO HOLBROOK

ONLY A COWBOY

FULLER AND WARREN

THE TRAIL TO MEXICO

THE HORSE WRANGLER

CALIFORNIA JOE

THE BOSTON BURGLAR

SAM BASS

THE ZEBRA DUN

THE BUFFALO SKINNERS

MACAFFIE'S CONFESSION

LITTLE JOE, THE WRANGLER

HARRY BALE

FOREMAN MONROE

THE DREARY BLACK HILLS

A MORMON SONG

THE BUFFALO HUNTERS

THE LITTLE OLD SOD SHANTY

THE GOL-DARNED WHEEL

BONNIE BLACK BESS

THE LAST LONGHORN

A PRISONER FOR LIFE

THE WARS OF GERMANY

FREIGHTING FROM WILCOX TO GLOBE

THE ARIZONA BOYS AND GIRLS

THE DYING RANGER

THE FAIR FANNIE MOORE

HELL IN TEXAS

BY MARKENTURA'S FLOWERY MARGE

THE STATE OF ARKANSAW

THE TEXAS COWBOY

THE DREARY, DREARY LIFE

JIM FARROW

YOUNG CHARLOTTIE

THE SKEW-BALL BLACK

THE RAMBLING COWBOY

THE COWBOY AT CHURCH

THE U. S. A. RECRUIT

THE COWGIRL

THE SHANTY BOY

ROOT HOG OR DIE

SWEET BETSY FROM PIKE

THE DISHEARTENED RANGER

THE MELANCHOLY COWBOY

BOB STANFORD

CHARLIE RUTLAGE

THE RANGE RIDERS

HER WHITE BOSOM BARE

JUAN MURRAY

GREER COUNTY

ROSIN THE BOW

THE GREAT ROUND-UP

THE JOLLY COWBOY

THE CONVICT

JACK O' DIAMONDS

THE COWBOY'S MEDITATION

BILLY VENERO

DOGIE SONG

THE BOOZER

DRINKING SONG

A FRAGMENT

A MAN NAMED HODS

A FRAGMENT

THE LONE STAR TRAIL

WAY DOWN IN MEXICO

RATTLESNAKE—A RANCH HAYING SONG

THE RAILROAD CORRAL

THE SONG OF THE "METIS" TRAPPER

THE CAMP FIRE HAS GONE OUT

NIGHT-HERDING SONG

TAIL PIECE

THE HABIT5

OLD PAINT6

DOWN SOUTH ON THE RIO GRANDE

SILVER JACK7

THE COWBOY'S CHRISTMAS BALL8

PINTO

THE GAL I LEFT BEHIND ME

BILLY THE KID

THE HELL-BOUND TRAIN

THE OLD SCOUT'S LAMENT

THE DESERTED ADOBE

THE COWBOY AT WORK

HERE'S TO THE RANGER!

MUSTER OUT THE RANGER

A COW CAMP ON THE RANGE

FRECKLES. A FRAGMENT

WHOSE OLD COW?

OLD TIME COWBOY

BUCKING BRONCHO

THE PECOS QUEEN

CHOPO

TOP HAND

CALIFORNIA TRAIL

BRONC PEELER'S SONG

A DEER HUNT

WINDY BILL

WILD ROVERS

LIFE IN A HALF-BREED SHACK

THE ROAD TO COOK'S PEAK

ARAPHOE, OR BUCKSKIN JOE

ROUNDED UP IN GLORY

THE DRUNKARD'S HELL

RAMBLING BOY

BRIGHAM YOUNG. I

BRIGHAM YOUNG. II

THE OLD GRAY MULE

THE FOOLS OF FORTY-NINE

A RIPPING TRIP13

THE HAPPY MINER

THE CALIFORNIA STAGE COMPANY

NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM

Отрывок из книги

It is now four or five years since my attention was called to the collection of native American ballads from the Southwest, already begun by Professor Lomax. At that time, he seemed hardly to appreciate their full value and importance. To my colleague, Professor G.L. Kittredge, probably the most eminent authority on folk-song in America, this value and importance appeared as indubitable as it appeared to me. We heartily joined in encouraging the work, as a real contribution both to literature and to learning. The present volume is the first published result of these efforts.

The value and importance of the work seems to me double. One phase of it is perhaps too highly special ever to be popular. Whoever has begun the inexhaustibly fascinating study of popular song and literature—of the nameless poetry which vigorously lives through the centuries—must be perplexed by the necessarily conjectural opinions concerning its origin and development held by various and disputing scholars. When songs were made in times and terms which for centuries have been not living facts but facts of remote history or tradition, it is impossible to be sure quite how they begun, and by quite what means they sifted through the centuries into the forms at last securely theirs, in the final rigidity of print. 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.

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The big ranches of the West are now being cut up into small farms. The nester has come, and come to stay. Gone is the buffalo, the Indian warwhoop, the free grass of the open plain;—even the stinging lizard, the horned frog, the centipede, the prairie dog, the rattlesnake, are fast disappearing. Save in some of the secluded valleys of southern New Mexico, the old-time round-up is no more; the trails to Kansas and to Montana have become grass-grown or lost in fields of waving grain; the maverick steer, the regal longhorn, has been supplanted by his unpoetic but more beefy and profitable Polled Angus, Durham, and Hereford cousins from across the seas. The changing and romantic West of the early days lives mainly in story and in song. The last figure to vanish is the cowboy, the animating spirit of the vanishing era. He sits 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." Dauntless, reckless, without the unearthly purity of Sir Galahad though as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, he is truly a knight of the twentieth century. 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 divide, the breeze brings to the ears, faint and far yet cheery still, the refrain of a cowboy song:

As for the songs of this collection, I have violated the ethics of ballad-gatherers, in a few instances, by 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. The songs have been arranged in some such haphazard way as they were collected,—jotted down on a table in the rear of saloons, scrawled on an envelope while squatting about a campfire, caught behind the scenes of a broncho-busting outfit. Later, it is hoped that enough interest will be aroused to justify printing all the variants of these songs, accompanied by the music and such explanatory notes as may be useful; the negro folk-songs, the songs of the lumber jacks, the songs of the mountaineers, and the songs of the sea, already partially collected, being included in the final publication. The songs of this collection, never before in print, as a rule have been taken down from oral recitation. In only a few instances have I been able to discover the authorship of any song. They seem to have sprung up as quietly and mysteriously as does the grass on the plains. All have been popular with the range riders, several being current all the way from Texas to Montana, and quite as long as the old Chisholm Trail stretching between these states. Some of the songs the cowboy certainly composed; all of them he sang. Obviously, a number of the most characteristic cannot be printed for general circulation. To paraphrase slightly what Sidney Lanier said of Walt Whitman's poetry, they are raw collops slashed from the rump of Nature, and never mind the gristle. Likewise some of the strong adjectives and nouns have been softened,—Jonahed, as George Meredith would have said. There is, however, a Homeric quality about the cowboy's profanity and vulgarity that pleases rather than repulses. The broad sky under which he slept, the limitless plains over which he rode, the big, open, free life he lived near to Nature's breast, taught him simplicity, calm, directness. He spoke out plainly the impulses of his heart. But as yet so-called polite society is not quite willing to hear.

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