{illust. Lyrics = Kind friends, if you will listen, A story I will tell
A-bout a final bust-up, That happened down in Dell.}
COWBOY SONGS and ballads are generally ranked alongside Negro spirituals
as being the most important of America's contributions to folk song. As
compared with the old English and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and
all other ballads of the American frontiers generally sound cheap and
shoddy. Since John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy
songs have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been
recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized, often--and
naturally--without any semblance to cowboy style, by thousands of radio
singers. Two general anthologies are recommended especially for the
cowboy songs they contain: _American Ballads and Folk Songs_, by John
A. and Alan Lomax, Macmillan, New York, 1934; _The American Songbag_, by
Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927.
LARRIN, MARGARET. _Singing Cowboy_ (with music), New York, 1931. OP.
LOMAX, JOHN A., and LOMAX, ALAN. _Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier
Ballads_, Macmillan, New York, 1938. This is a much added-to and revised
form of Lomax's 1910 collection, under the same title. It is the most
complete of all anthologies. More than any other man, John A. Lomax is
responsible for having made cowboy songs a part of the common heritage
of America. His autobiographic _Adventures of a Ballad Hunter_
(Macmillan, 1947) is in quality far above the jingles that most cowboy
songs are.
Missouri, as no other state, gave to the West and Southwest. Much of
Missouri is still more southwestern in character than much of Oklahoma.
For a full collection, with full treatment, of the ballads and songs,
including bad-man and cowboy songs, sung in the Southwest there is
nothing better than _Ozark Folksongs_, collected and edited by Vance
Randolph, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, 1946-50. An
unsurpassed work in four handsome volumes.
OWENS, WILLIAM A. _Texas Folk Songs_, Southern Methodist University
Press, Dallas, 1950. A miscellany of British ballads, American ballads,
"songs of doleful love," etc. collected in Texas mostly from country
people of Anglo-American stock. Musical scores for all the songs.
The Texas Folklore Society has published many cowboy songs. Its
publications _Texas and Southwestern Lore_ (1927) and _Follow de
Drinkin' Gou'd_ (1928) contain scores, with music and anecdotal
interpretations. Other volumes contain other kinds of songs, including
Mexican.
THORP, JACK (N. Howard). _Songs of the Cowboys_, Boston, 1921. OP. Good,
though limited, anthology, without music and with illuminating comments.
A pamphlet collection that Thorp privately printed at Estancia, New
Mexico, in 1908, was one of the first to be published. Thorp had the
perspective of both range and civilization. He was a kind of troubadour
himself. The opening chapter, "Banjo in the Cow Camps," of his
posthumous reminiscences, _Pardner of the Wind, is_ delicious.