The Dying Cowboy Song

JOHN BARSNESS Montana State University Tlie Dying Cowboy Sonj Come all you good old cowboys And listen to my rhymes — We are West of Eastern Texas And mostly men of crimes. ... —“cowboy” song For most of the twentieth century the so-called cowboy song has been generally accepted as an authentic area of American folk­ lore. In such collections of songs as those of John and Alan Lomax a wide variety of western lyrics and music has long been accepted as true folk-material of a distinctly distinguishable American sub­ culture, although there are frequently startling differences among the various images which these songs present. So much of this material is implicitly and sentimentally romantic that the whole notion that it represents an authentic image of the cowboy must finally be questioned —particularly that which envisions him singing at his daily rounds, soothing his cattle and enlivening his daily life with the plaintive comforts of his tunes. Too many “collections” — some as recently as 1964 — range themselves on the positive side of this vision, producing not only the songs but an expressed faith that they are — as Chauncey Moore describes his collection1 — “saturated with the spirit of early-day Oklahoma” —or Montana, or Texas, or someplace else in the West. No one seems to want to go beyond this combination of testi­ mony and song, which characterizes not only the popular but many ]Chauncey Moore, Ballads & Folk Songs of the Southwest (Norman, Oklahoma, 1964), p. 267. The Dying Cowboy Song 51 more serious compendiums. It has seemed unnecessary, since real Westerners sang real songs into the collector’s microphones. But an odd difference occurs when one goes to other sources to discover the cowboy. First of all, the cowboy himself —that is, the cowboy who hasn’t volunteered to sing —is not only a considerably coarser creature than these songs portray him, but tends pretty much to ignore song. Of some twenty volumes on the cowboy, ten of which were autobiographies written anytime from the 1870’s to the 1920’s, I found only two which made any extensive reference to singing —E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott’s We Pointed Them, North and Ike Blasingame’s Dakota Cowboy. Of Blasingame’s three refer­ ences, two are non-occupational, one occurring in a honky-tonk joke and the other in a respectable Victorian parlor around a piano. Both are worth noting, since they perhaps reveal more about the actual place of song in the cowboy’s life than the other reference, which concerns a traditional situation, singing to the herd: a circumstance much beloved of the Western story, but not much concerned with the real nature of cowboy life, as Blasingame admits. Abbott, on the other hand, frequently refers to singing and claims composition of at least one cowboy song himself. But this is only one book out of a random selection of twenty —and a book whose reliability I have grave doubts about. I knew “Teddy Blue” personally; his ranch was only a couple of miles from the rural school I attended in Montana. I have heard many of the tales in We Pointed Them North from the old man himself; I would not accuse any man of being a liar, but I heard at least three different versions of some of those tales from him. At the time Helena Huntington Smith took down, his story, Abbott had for many years basked in the glory of being the last of the old time Texas cowboys. It is possible that, like many another oldtimer, he was adding to the romantic myth himself by this time. The book itself supports the notion. It is surprising, for instance, how many famous and romantic Western characters Abbott seems to have known personally. The list ranges from Sam Bass (who is supposed to have worked on his father’s ranch) to Theodore Roosevelt, met during the rustling activities in the ’80’s. And when he talks about singing to the herd, it is right in the tradition: His horse stepped into one of them holes and both went down before the stampede . . . after that, orders were given to sing 52 Western American Literature when you were...