HOW COWBOY SONGS GOT

STARTED

by Tom Faigin

Mexicans had owned large ranches south of San Antonio until a group of determined gringos won the Mexican War in 1848 and drove them out. Texas cowboys stole these ranches, adopted the vaqueros’ costume and learned how to brand cattle to keep their herds’ identity separate from the other ranchers. The riata, used for roping cattle, became the English ‘lariat." The cattle of Texas or Tejas (Te has), as the Spanish called it, originally came from the fighting bulls of Spain and they had dangerously long horns, sometimes eight to twelve feet across.

After the Civil War was won by the North, the great boom in the cattle business began. A huge new immigrant population began arriving on American shores. Indians were being driven onto reservations as the drive for land continued. In Texas a steer worth $5.00 was selling for $50.00 in the Eastern markets. Texas cattlemen, impoverished by four years of Civil War, rounded up the five million cattle roaming wild around San Antonio and began making huge profits as new markets opened up.

Since East—West railroads only traveled as far south as Abilene, Kansas City and Sedalia, Missouri, huge cattle herds had to be marched north hundreds of miles from south Texas to the newly opened railheads. Various routes were taken and they were called the Shawnee Trail, the East Trail, West Trail and the most famous of all, the Chisholm Trail. Obstacles faced these trail-drivers or cowboys as they tried to get their product to market while facing hostile Indian attacks, lightening storms, stampedes and outlaws. J.J. McCoy, an Illinois cattle buyer, figured out a plan to expedite the movement of these huge herds. He got the Kansas Pacific Railroad to build a cattle shipping station in Abilene, Kansas, a sleepy little town, and by 1880 the Texans had shipped five million cattle to market from the Kansas railroads.

Next, the music began to develop. As the cowboy workers drove North, they were confronted with many problems. How could they keep awake during long shifts in the saddle? How could they keep alive during a cattle stampede? What could they do to keep the finicky longhorns from running amuck during a storm, an Indian or outlaw attack? Singing was the answer. Cowboys sang to their cattle to calm them down. They sang to each other to ascertain their positions in relation to the herd. They even sang to keep awake during the long roundup.

Most of the cowboys were drifters or runaways from the overflowing cities. Some were stubborn individuals who loved the wide open spaces. What did they sing about and how did this group of uneducated itinerants create a distinctive body of American folk song? They sang about their immediate emotional concerns: the hardships of their jobs, their lonely feelings, making and losing money and the dangers they faced while on the trail. First of all, these songs were group products or projects, not the work of one individual. The melodies were borrowed from older melodies and modified to fit the needs of the cowboys in their daily struggles. English and Scottish ballads, Irish reels, Negro spirituals, German art songs and sentimental popular songs of the day were all grist for the cowboy "song mill". New words and phrases were added to the language as the cowboys tried to master their environment. A dogie was a motherless calf, all alone like the cowboy himself.

Ride around, little dogies,

Ride around them slow,

For the fiery and the snuffy

Are rarin’ to go.

Little tinges of humor poke fun at the danger and difficulties the cowboys faced every day.

I woke up one morning on the old Chisholm Trail,

A rope in my hand and a cow by the tail

Loneliness and a love for his horse were also a constant theme in many of the songs.

When I die, take my saddle from the wall,

Put it on my pony, lead him out of his stall.

Tie my bones to his back, turn our/aces to the west,

And well ride the prairie that we love the best.

As the songs were passed from one cowboy to another, verses were added and the best ones were kept and improved. In this way, hundreds of new songs were created out of old ones. John Lomax, a college English teacher and folklorist, began collecting these songs in 1910. His book, Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads, became the first of many to recognize the importance of this new and rich body of American folk music. Although the historical period of the cowboy only lasted about 30 years, cowboy songs, literature and movies have been with us until the present.

Tom Faigin has taught guitar, banjo and mandolin to private students since 1960 while teaching guitar classes at UCLA, CSULA, CSUN and many other colleges, schools and organizations. Tom has performed on radio, TV, given concerts and lectured on folk music at California State University at Los Angeles. Currently, Tom is teaching English and ESL at James Monroe High School and actively uses folksongs and guitar music to motivate his students.