CHAPTER 28
Song Writers and Songs Since 1860
You seem to be made out of steel,
Your eyes, they shine brightly,
You do things, uprightly,
In a way that's a shame to reveal.
C. R. MOORE. BANDON HIGH SCHOOL OPERA, 1909
Why haven’t we had Oregon cowboy songs? Why can’t we point to a whole logging minstrelsy? Perhaps wheat lends itself to economics more than to music, but isn’t it to be expected that we would have ballads of the salmon fisherman, of the hop pickers, of the berry harvesters, and in varied celebrity of the Oregon apple? And why no sweet resonance to match the fragrance of the haystacks?
Pete French’s cowboys on the great P-Ranch in Harney County and the riders on all the far stretching ranges of Eastern Oregon sang plaintive melodies of other trails, of other herds and of lonely nights under other skies than their own. The logger has been sartorially original and has clothed himself in distinctive garments, but his songs, if he sang any, were not of his own making nor in expression of his own calling. Stewart H. Holbrook, a Portland writer who knows the big woods and those who work in them, confirms the lack of Oregon timber songs which a fairly diligent and resourceful search could not turn up in printed records.
When you come to think of it, Oregon’s main industries are of a curiously silent sort—the cattle ranges located amidst the austere soundlessness of the desert; the noise of the timberman's saw and ax unaccompanied by human voices, and meals dispatched
