David Wendell Fentress Guion was born in Ballinger, Texas, on December
15, 1895. He received his musical training at the piano with local
teachers and with Leopold Godowsky in Vienna. After returning to the
United States he filled several posts as teacher of music in Texas, and
from 1925 to 1928 taught piano at the Chicago Music College. Early in
the 1930’s he appeared in a cowboy production featuring his own music at
the Roxy Theater in New York and soon thereafter made weekly broadcasts
over the National Broadcasting Company network. A David Guion Week was
celebrated throughout Texas in 1950.
He is best known for his skilful arrangements and transcriptions of
Western folk songs and Negro Spirituals, some of which first became
famous in his versions. His orchestral adaptation of “The Arkansas
Traveler” has long been a favorite on “pop” concerts. A familiar legend
helped to dramatize this American folk song to many. A traveler caught
in the rain stops outside an Arkansas hut where an old man is playing
part of a folk tune on his fiddle. Upon questioning him the traveler
learns that the old fiddler does not know the rest of the song,
whereupon the stranger takes the fiddle from him and completes it. The
two then become devoted friends.
Even more famous is David Guion’s arrangement of “Home on the Range,” in
1930. It is not quite clear who actually wrote this song. It was
discovered by John A. Lomax who heard it sung by a Texan saloon keeper,
recorded it, and published it in his 1910 edition of _Cowboy Songs_.
Only after Guion had arranged it did it become a national favorite over
the radio, its popularity no doubt immensely enhanced by the widely
circulated story that this was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
favorite song.
Guion’s concert arrangement for full orchestra of “Turkey in the Straw”
is also of interest. This folk tune—sometimes known as “Zip Coon”—first
achieved popularity on the American musical stage in the era before the
minstrel show. It was published in Baltimore in 1834 and first made
popular that year by Bob Farrell at the Bowery Theater. After that it
was a familiar routine of the black-faced entertainer, George Washington
Dixon. Several have laid claim to the song, but it is most likely
derived from an English or Irish melody.
Other arrangements and transcriptions by Guion include “Nobody Knows De
Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Oh, Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “Ride Cowboy
Ride,” “Short’nin’ Bread,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
Guion has also written several compositions of his own in which the folk
element is pronounced. One of these is named _Alley Tunes_, three
musical scenes from the South. Its most famous movement is the last,
“The Harmonica Player,” but the earlier two are equally appealing for
their homespun melodies and vigorous national identity: “Brudder
Sinkiller and His Flock of Sheep” and “The Lonesome Whistler.” Another
pleasing orchestral composition by Guion is a waltz suite entitled
_Southern Nights_.