Cowboy songs

Cowboys in the early days made their own music. They sang, and there were a lot of songs. Sadly, maybe 90% of these songs have been lost, never written down by anyone with the sense to realize they were worth saving and would die with the cowboys who sang them. Today I’m writing about four collections of cowboy songs, two by folklorists and two by performers today who’ve made a career of passing them along to the next generation.

Nathan Howard Thorp, Songs of the Cowboys

Nathan Howard "Jack" Thorp (1867-1940) was the pioneer collector of cowboy songs, publishing the first edition of this book in 1908 and then expanding it in 1921 to its present length of 101 songs and poems, a quarter of them authored by Thorp himself.

Thorp was born and educated in the East but cowboyed as a young man in Nebraska and the Southwest, eventually settling in New Mexico, where he owned his own ranch. From an early age he began transcribing the songs he heard sung by cowboys. Although cowboy poetry thrives today, these early examples of this oral tradition would have surely disappeared without the efforts of Thorp and a handful of other collectors.

The songs capture the spirit, humor, and language of working cowboys. The sentiments range from youthful boasting and celebration of cowboy life to complaints about the hard work to nostalgic reminiscences about old trail pals to mournful laments about loneliness, misfortune, and death ("Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie"). Thorp's own contribution to the tradition, "Little Joe, the Wrangler," became popular and was widely recorded. It tells of a brave young wrangler killed in a cattle stampede. Hear Justin Bishop sing it below:

Read accounts of cowboys in the early days, and you discover that they loved to sing, and it didn't matter much if they were any good. The cattle on the trail drives got sung to by the night herders. Sometimes cowboys burst into song for no particular reason except excess energy and sheer delight in being alive. A song about the outlaw “Sam Bass” was apparently a favorite. Here's an old 78rpm recorded version, with the words so you can sing along:



After decades of western novels with maybe a stanza of a song sprinkled in here and there as a kind of interlude in the story, it took the sound movie to give the cowboy back his singing voice. Soon we had Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, and the Sons of the Pioneers. John Wayne even gives it a try in an early B-Western. These were all the right idea, maybe, but not the real thing. Thorp's collection of songs literally gathered in the field opens a window with a more authentic view of the hearts and minds of that fraternity of young horsemen who were the first cowboys.