Songs of the Cowboys (1921)/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
We talk in the East of a public for poetry, and when we use this term we are usually thinking of the public that will, or will not, be prevailed upon to buy the books of poetry regularly issued by the standard Eastern publishers. But there is in this country a considerable public for poetry of which no account is taken in the yearly summaries of The Publishers' Weekly; that is, the public that enjoys and creates folk-poetry in the United States, a public much larger and more varied than we imagine. In this connection we have the story of a cowboy down on his luck who had a collection of cowboy songs printed (some of which he had written himself) and sold enough copies of the little volume to set himself up in business again. This does n’t mean that he sold enough to buy a new outfit — “a forty-dollar saddle on a twenty-dollar horse” — and start punching cattle again. No; the sum made on the little paper-covered volume was very much more than that; it would have made any Eastern poet jealous. And the book was sold, not at news stands or book stores, but, like the old broad-sheet ballads, at cow-camps and round-ups and cattle-fairs.
The title of this little book was Songs of the Cowboys, the collector, N. Howard Thorp, and the book was set up by an Estancia print-shop in 1908. Mr. Thorp himself was the author of five of the songs in this volume, later included in Mr. John A. Lomax’s collection of Cowboy Songs—“Chopo,” “The Pecos River Queen,” “Little Joe, the Wrangler.” “Whose Old Cow?” and “Speckles,” this last reprinted in Mr. Lomax’s book under the title of “Freckles; A Fragment,” just as it came from the hands of the local printer who had lost half the copy.
The present collection is, therefore, an enlarged edition of this little volume of 1908, with muchi new material, not the least interesting of which are the twenty-five songs by the author.
As a cowboy poet, N. Howard Thorp — better known as “Jack Thorp” to his many friends in the Southwest — is the genuine thing. He is an old-time cattleman and cowpuncher, and his songs are the fruit of experience. His gift is instinctive and naïve, like that of all real cowboy poets, and its charm is precisely in its fresh and “unliterary” quality.
“How long have you been in this country?” I
asked “Jack” Thorp one day soon after I met him.
We were sitting on the well-curb in the plaza of an
Indian pueblo watching a Rain-Dance.
“You see those cedars up there on the hills?” he said, looking above the roof-tops to the foothills. “Well, I planted them.”
It was a typical cowboy answer, evasive and symbolic, and it indicated perfectly well that he might be regarded as part of the soil. The cowboy does n’t “loosen up” until he knows you fairly well. When he does, it is usually worth while. I recall now innumerable reminiscences of “Jack” Thorp’s when he was in more expansive mood, of which I wish I could give the exact tone and flavor.
His account of the “Sconers” at the opening-up of the Indian Territory — Guthrie’s first citizen: The hour set for taking up claims was twelve o’clock in the morning; but when they came upon this old man at noon he had three acres ploughed with a pair of oxen, which he claimed to have done since sunrise! His stories of the early days in Lincoln County, New Mexico—Pat Garrett unveiled (see postscript to “Billy the Kid,” by which there hangs a tale). . . . Running down a bunch of stolen cattle through the Four Corners country, i.e., Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah — some of the wildest country still to be found in these States. . . . Old days in the backwoods in Texas, scene of “The Little Cow-girl,” where “they may not know the national anthem, but they all know Turkey in the Straw.” . . . Early times along and across the Mexican border, when “headin’ west from San Antone” was a part of the regular ritual. . . . Also an experience of only a few years back, which, as it illustrates a bit of international diplomacy, may be worth telling here.
Mr. Thorp was driving some cattle from Old Mexico up to Lamy, near Santa Fe. As it happened, he was unarmed, since on the way down from Tucson, Arizona, to El Sasabe on the line, he fell in with a priest who used up all the ammunition for Thorp’s six-gun shooting prairie dogs. Finding when he got to El Sasabe that he could n’t get any more cartridges of the right size, Thorp tossed the gun into a drawer of the priest's secretary, and went into Mexico with two other men whom he had hired on the border. Having found the herd and started back with it, these three met a company of about forty Villistas. The ragged general (nothing lower than a general in Villa’s army) accosted the outfit. “Are you armed?” he asked Thorp. “Yes,” “And your men?” Again Thorp said, “Yes.” “Who gave you the right to carry arms in Mexico?” asked the general, “The Governor of the State of Texas,” said Jack. There was a world of remembered history in that answer, and the general, in spite of his superior numbers, permitted them to pass unmolested, though eyeing the cattle hungrily. If Therp had said, “The President of the United States,” it would have been of small avail, as the Republic of Texas is still far more real to most Mexicans than is our flourishing Union, of which it is now a member.
All this is but a suggestion of the extraordinary richness of a life lived during the frontier period in the Southwest — a period that is, happily, not yet ended, although old-timers will tell you, as the old settler in the Organ Mountains said, when he found a few cattle with strange brands straying into his eighty-mile solitude, “It's gettin' too crowded here — guess I'll have to move on.”
Monotonous on the surface, the cowboy’s life is usually an adventurous one. When I asked Mr. Thorp for a sketch of his life, he said, “Just say that I've been everything but a telegraph operator or a preacher.” (But if he has n’t preached, he once gave a series of lectures on the Holy Land with stereopticon slides!)
The task of trying to give a portrait of a man of this character is like trying to give a composite picture of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the Indian Territory during the last thirty years. . . .
The hundred songs that make up this book are
typical and genuine cowboy songs; the river and
hobo and outlaw songs that are also a part of the
cowboy's repertory having been omitted. A number
of songs that belong more specifically to the
Central States have also been omitted. Wherever
possible, Mr. Thorp has given the names of the authors
of the songs and, when these could not be
discovered, the cowboys who sang them, or the place
where he found them.
The fact that most of these songs are of known authorship, or that some of them appeared originally in print, in no way lessens their genuine folk-quality. Otherwise, many of the old English and Irish broad-sheet ballads which have come down to us through oral tradition, but were, as the term indicates, originally printed, could not be called folk-songs. (As indubitable examples of folk-songs with a printed origin and of individual authorship, one may mention the “Suwanee River” and “Old Kentucky Home” and other songs by Stephen Foster. “Auld Lang Syne” is another folk-song, which, if the identity of its celebrated author were forgotten, would be included in all the folk-lore collections.)
The more one examines the evidence, the more one is convinced that it is the use of a song, rather than its origin, which determines what is known as folk-song. Conditions favorable to the production or preservation of folk-song are: a communal unity of interest or occupation, and a certain degree of isolation from the larger world of affairs, and from continuous contact with printed sources. These are the conditions which produced the cowboy songs — probably our largest body of native folk-songs, except, of course, the folk-songs of negro source or inspiration. (The songs of the American Indians are available only in translation.)
Cowboy songs are, generally speaking, of two types; first, songs transmitted by purely oral tradition; and, second, songs originally printed, clipped from a local newspaper or magazine, fitted to a familiar air, and so handed down from one cowboy to another, becoming genuine tolk-songs in the process. During the transition a certain amount of reshaping often takes place. Verses may be added or left out, or the wording altered — these changes usually tending toward a greater simplicity and directness and a more graphic cowboy lingo. An interesting recent example of such a reshaping through oral transmission is furnished by Badger Clark’s “The Glory Trail,” sung among the cowboys in southern Arizona under the title of “High-Chin Bob.”
The differences between the two versions may be noted by referring to the original in Mr. Clark’s Sun and Saddle Leather. Obviously some one found the song somewhere in print, adapted it to a familiar tune, and passed it on. This is the history of a number of the songs. Again, others have been built upon well-known airs; “The Cowboy's Dream” is sung to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” and Jack Thorp's “Little Joe, the Wrangler” was composed to the tune of “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.”
Many of the cowboy songs, and almost all of the earlier ones, belong to the first type; they exist independent of any printed origin and have come down to us through oral tradition. They are anonymous because their authors have been forgotten, but this does not mean that they were not in the first place of individual authorship; although songs of such loose and catchy structure as “The Old Chisholm Trail,” “Old Paint,” or “The Deer Hunt” lend themselves easily to composite touches. Nor are all of the earlier songs without antecedents. “The Dying Cowboy” was modeled upon a sea-chantey and “The Cowboy’s Lament” has been traced to a popular Irish military song of the eighteenth century — the cowboy who had the old song in his memory may well have been of that race. Indeed, the accent of many of the songs has a distinctly Celtic echo:
He had a lovely daughter, on whom I cast my eye.
But such adaptation and borrowing, far from proving the cowboy songs merely “derelicts,” as Professor Gerrould called them in a recent number of the New York Evening Post, is a very usual process, not only with folk-poets, but with other poets as well. Burns modeled many of his poems on well-known songs and airs of the countryside, and they are not therefore merely “derelicts”; nor is Mr. Yeats’s “When I am Old and Gray and Full of Sleep” a “derelict” because Ronsard fathered it. In this connection it is interesting to see the cropping-up of an old theme, although perfectly unconsciously and with no debt to Villon, in Mr. Thorp's “What’s Become of the Punchers We Rode with Long Ago?” This is a case, not of borrowing, but of the eternal recurrence of certain old themes.
To test American cowboy songs by the finest flower of English or European balladry, as is sometimes done by distinguished folk-lore students who come over here to obtain survivals of their own songs, in the Kentucky mountains and elsewhere, is of course a mistake. Cowboy ballads represent a folk-tradition still in the making — their greatest antiquity is only a little over a half century — and the European ballads are several centuries old, and have the advantage of a literary tradition even older. Indeed, this tradition is so distinctly literary in origin that, but for the oral use and transmission of the songs, one might hesitate to call them folk-songs! But to say, as Mr. Cecil Sharp does, that “The cowboy has been despoiled of his inheritance of traditional song; he has nothing behind him,” is again a mistake. There are various degrees of sophistication among the cowboys, as one can see in these songs. James Russell Lowell, when he wrote the “Biglow Papers,” was not thereby despoiled of his literary inheritance, nor was John Hay when he wrote “Jim Bludso,” or Charles Godfrey Leland when he wrote the Hans Breitmann Ballads. The lack of literary associations in the cowboy songs is not necessarily an indication of a corresponding lack of tradition or background in their composers. American cowpunchers have, indeed, been drawn from all walks in life, but the majority of them belong to that same pioneer stock which settled the East, the Middle West, the Far West, and the Southwest, in turn; the same sort of pioneer stock that produced Mark Twain and Bret Harte.
Whatever the cowboy’s “inheritance of traditional song” may or may not have been (and it was that of the general American public of the period), the fact that counts is his creation of a new tradition — a tradition of which these songs are the most authentic record. What one appreciates in the survivals of the old English folk-songs is precisely the literary association, and their beautifully simple but highly evolved poetic form. But the associations of cowboy songs are directly local and immediate, and perhaps these can be appreciated fully only by those familiar with the life that has produced them.
It is quite true that the world of the cowboy songs is less imaginary than actual. It was a concrete world the cowboy lived in — he could n't escape too much into the world of the imagination. If he did, he might forget and let the old cow die bogged down, or slide to perdition from the back of the bucking bronco. His world is not, it is true, peopled with fairies or ghostly apparitions or knights in steel armor. Instead, he writes of dying longhorns, buffaloes, mule-skinners, bucking broncos, stampeding cattle, and his hard-handed companions of the trail and chuck-wagon. His armor is his own, and he celebrates it — chaps, slicker, spurs, saddle reata, and horse. His life is — cattle; but those who think this life prosaic overlook the hidden romance, the lonely and tragic and humorous events of the round-up, the long trail-drive, or the night-watch.
Whenever the cowboy poet deserts the actual world, it is to dream of a cowboy heaven. (And, after all, was not just such an arbitrarily arranged heaven the basic fabric of Dante’s dream?) During the long night-watch, the cowboy looks up through the clear atmosphere to the star-besprinkled heavens and wonders about the Hereafter in terms amusingly translated from his daily occupation:
A maverick unbranded on high,
And get cut in the bunch with the “rusties”
When the boss of the riders goes by.
He carried the same terminology into his courtship songs, and indeed into all his songs, and thereby creates or perpetuates a new idiom. (In fact the cowboys have contributed a new idiom to our national speech. We never have a big party convention without certain headlines appearing: “Politicians ‘milling around’; leaders afraid of a ‘stampede.’”) About this idiom in his songs, the cowboy poet is far more exacting than about any question of rhyme or meter; and any departure from the correct vernacular or handling of the various leathers is at once detected as a mark of the tenderfoot poet.
The tradition is, then, intact in these cowboy songs, and we may accept them for what they are — naive records of the hard and free life on the range, celebrating such adventures as belong to virgin soil, pioneer hardships, dangers, and fun. Fun is, indeed, one of the chief characteristics of these songs, and it is a fun that includes the same sort of humorous exaggeration in which Mark Twain excelled.
My excuse for touching, in this introduction, upon the pedagogical folk-aspect of these songs, which depends, after all, upon their spontaneous appeal to those for whom they were written, is simply that, in appropriate phraseology, I would rather be caught “heeled,” and these are questions which will undoubtedly crop up in connection with the book.
But those who know and appreciate the life celebrated in these songs will need no introduction or explanation; and it is for such readers and old-timers particularly that the book is intended. If Mr. Thorp had written a preface for the book, his gesture would probably have been as simple as that of the Mayor of Las Vegas, who said at the recent Cowboy Reunion, “The town is yours, Boys, take care of it.”
ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON
Santa Fe
New Mexico