Banjo in the Cow Camps

I

Words and banjo-strumming floated soft and clear on the night. I reined up in the brush to listen. It was pitch-dark where I was, Pecos River behind me, Roswell down that-a-way quite a piece, and somebody’s chuck wagon just ahead, drawn up for the night in flat sand-dune country rich in grama grass and tabosa. The campfire flickered and fell. I knew there would be maybe half a dozen men sprawled around it, their day’s riding done, supper over, and a banjo-pickin’ cowboy to tell a story under the stars: a story in verse, about their own country and kind, in their lingo, home-grown and maybe as thorny as cactus. This one I was hearing now was about ‘a little steel dust the color of rust,’ the fastest cutting-horse in Texas — name of Dodgin’ Joe. It was a new song to me. As the final words died away, I rode into the light of the campfire. . . .

A young man’s impulse sent me out on the road collecting cowboy songs almost fifty years ago. And it was more than thirty years ago, in the year 1908, that I made a dicker with a printer in Estancia, New Mexico, to print two thousand copies of the first little book of cowboy songs ever published. I paid the printer six cents per copy. The book was printed on rough stock and bound in red paper. There were fifty pages, twentyfour songs.

I advertised in some Kansas papers that published patent sheets, and sold a good many of the books at fifty cents apiece. They were fragile, and most of the copies probably were torn to pieces or lost long ago. The few that are left fetch twenty-five dollars or so from collectors.

Few people know of the difficulties encountered in gathering those first songs. Today you can find scores of cowboy ballads in songbooks accessible anywhere, and Tin-pan Alley manufactures new ones fresh every hour. In the ‘90’s, with the exception of about a dozen, cowboy songs were not generally known. The only ones I could find I gathered piecemeal on horseback trips that lasted months and took me hundreds of miles through half a dozen cowcountry states.

On this evening I’m telling about, in March of ‘89, my first song hunt proper started. I had been looking for a couple of stray Bar W horses, and I was tired after a forty-five-mile ride. About to unpack and make a solitary camp, I spied fire in the distance. ‘What’s the use of campin’ by yourself? ‘ I thought. So I rode to the camp which Nigger Add and his men had pitched at the tail of their chuck wagon.

Cowmen from Toyah, Texas, to Las Vegas, New Mexico, knew Add, and most of them at different times had worked on roundups with him. He was the L F D outfit’s range boss, and worked South Texas colored hands almost entirely. Black though he was, Add was one of the best hands on the Pecos River, well liked, and in due time hero of a cowboy song himself.

I hobbled out my horses and rustled a plate and cup from the chuck box; coffee and a pot of stew were kept hot all night at such camps. Having eaten my fill, I inquired who had been singing just before I came in. Heads nodded at a colored boy known as ‘Lasses. I asked if he would mind singing the song again. He did it for me. But he knew only two verses — that’s all. And none of the other hands in camp knew more. That was one of the difficulties encountered in the earliest effort to assemble the unprinted verse of the range. None of the cowboys who could sing ever remembered an entire song. I would pick up a verse or two here, another verse or two there.

After ‘Lasses finished, I sang a song and so did several others. Somebody knew a couple of verses of ‘Sam Bass’ — not the whole thing. The other songs they knew were about cotton patches, like one which celebrated a colored girl named Mamie — she picked her weight of cotton in the morning, ‘twas said, then, with her feet under a bush and her head in the sun, went fast asleep. Cotton-picking songs were fine if you liked them, but they weren’t what I was after. By the light of the fire I copied in my notebook the two verses of ‘Dodgin’ Joe’ which ‘Lasses knew. Then I spread my tarp, wrapped my soogan around me, and, with feet to the fire, fought off sleep for a while because a big idea was buzzing in my head. Here I was, I told myself, workin’ for wages for the Bar W. Nothing on my mind. Not much in my pocket: three dollars or so, and no more comin’.

‘The cowboy’s life is a dreary life, though his mind
it is no load,
And he always spends his money like he found it
in the road.’

Nigger Add had told me the two horses I was looking for were safe in the L F D horse pasture; no need to worry more about them. I was handy with horses, and in cow country somebody was always wantin’ horses broke; they paid wages for it. My saddle horse, Gray Dog, and my pack horse, Ample, were my own property. Right here on my own range I had ridden into Add’s camp and heard part of a cowboy song brand-new to me.

‘If there’s one here,’ I thought, ‘there must be plenty more off my own range that I never heard.’

So I made up my mind to keep driftin’.

Next morning when the mule star went to bed and the morning star got up, I had breakfast and started. No trouble to say good-bye to my job. When I got near the first post office a week or so later, I dropped a letter in the box telling my boss where his two strays were, and adding that one of his cowhands was a stray now too, and he should expect me back when he saw my dust arrivin’.

‘Add,’ I said, ‘how far is it to the next water?’

‘Keep this draw ten or twelve miles, Jack,’ he told me. ‘You’ll see some cow trails comin’ in. Head due east and you’ll strike a dry lake.’

I was on my way!

A couple of hours after leaving the chuck wagon I reached Comanche Springs and there found two V T men watering a bunch of saddle horses. The rest of the day I saw no one. Just me, a couple of horses, a little rough country, a lot of rolling prairie; and at night, near the northeast end of Mescalero Valley, a lone camp and a dry one. I hobbled my horses, laid out my bed in a chamise flat where the brush was three to four feet high, ate a snack, and made a fire to be sociable and show the folks I was rich and had matches in my pocket.

II

Maybe cowboy singing was an answer to loneliness. Maybe it was just another way of expressing good fellowship. Maybe it was several things. Something happened in the day’s work, funny or sad, and somebody with a knack for words made a jingle of it; if it was liked, others learned it and passed it on. A ballad like ‘The Old Chisholm Trail,’ with its catching come ti yi youpy refrain, seems to have just grown. It was sung from the Canadian line to Mexico, and there were thousands of verses; nobody ever collected them all. Every cowboy knew some, and if he had a little whiskey in him, or was heading for town with wages in his pocket, he might make up a few. These weren’t ‘cultured’ songs. Sometimes the rhymes didn’t match very well. Often the language was rough and for publication had to be heavily expurgated. But ballad-making and song-singing were living parts of cowboy life.

I have never attempted any highbrow explanations of cowboy balladry. Not long ago in a newspaper I read a piece about the ‘singin’ families’ of East Tennessee who by word of mouth keep alive scores of ballads they have never seen in a book. It was that way on the range. Singing songs, and making them too (homely, everyday songs, not highbrow stuff), seem as natural to human beings as washing herself is to a cat. And the faculty gets more practice when people are cut off in isolated groups.

Three or four days after crossing the Llano Estacado (so flat, as Uncle Johnny Martin once said, that you could see the water in the bottom of a forty-foot well ten miles away), I was heading for the town of Tokio, up Red River way. I had started my travels toward Red River because an old cowman once told me that they did nothing much in that district but sing, cuss, and go to camp meetin’. Some miles short of Tokio I caught sight of a little ranch house and headed for it. The owner was busy slaughtering a beef. I turned to and helped him. We soon had the carcass cleaned and hung up. The rancher showed me the gate to his horse pasture; the grass looked fine and I decided to stay all night. Even if the owner had been away, I should have been welcome to go in and help myself to a meal and feed my horses. No doors were locked. All they asked was that you leave other things alone. If you wanted to, you might wash up the dishes you dirtied.

As we entered the house, I saw a banjo hanging on the wall.

‘You play?’

The rancher said he did. So I went to my pack and got my mandolin-banjo.

We ate a hearty supper. I pushed back and started up a song. My host was soon singing too. Little square room with a light in it, lonely cabin miles from any neighbor. Fire in the stove, dishes dirty, bellies full. Banjos makin’ melody. ‘ Sassiety ‘ enough for one night for a couple of horny cowhands. I don’t know how many songs we sang that night. The coyotes must have gathered outside and laid off howlin’ to listen.

Cowboy songs were always sung by one person, never by a group. I never did hear a cowboy with a real good voice; if he had one to start with, he always lost it bawling at cattle, or sleeping out in the open, or tellin’ the judge he didn’t steal that horse. Some of the cowboy actors and radio cowboys nowadays, of course, have very beautiful voices.

The cowboy hardly ever knew what tune he was singing his song to; just some old, old tune that he had heard and known as a boy. Very often the old familiar airs were used. Both ‘Little Joe the Wrangler’ and ‘Little Adobe Casa’ were sung to the air of ‘Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.’ ‘Sky High’ was sung to the tune of ‘Solomon Isaacs’; ‘Overland Stage’ to the air of ‘Son of a Gam-bo-leer.’ ‘The Little Cowgirl ‘ was sung to the tune of ‘Turkey in the Straw’; the people of Texas didn’t know the National Anthem, but they all knew ‘Turkey in the Straw.’

Two of the songs we sang that night, I know, were important for me. One was ‘Sam Bass.’ This famous song, if you don’t remember, has to do with a cowboy turned train robber and outlaw, and bet rayed by one of his pals. It is supposed to have been written by John Denton of Gainesville, Texas, about 1879. It goes like this: —

SAM BASS

And so on. I first heard some of it sung at a dance hall in Sidney, Nebraska, and one of the boys in Nigger Add’s camp had sung a couple of verses. My host this evening sang five verses, three of which I had not heard. Into the notebook they went. When I published my first little book, nearly twenty years later, I had found three more verses, making eight which appeared in the first printed version. But there were more. I printed eleven in my bigger book in 1921. This will indicate how songs grew. Versions were likely to vary from singer to singer. Verses were added, eliminated, altered, and otherwise ‘improved ‘ as they went the rounds. In my first version of ‘Sam Bass’ it was ‘ Jonis’ who was due to get a scorching ‘when Gabriel blows his horn’; in the later

version it was ‘Jim Murphy.’ Take into account that many of the songs had to be dry-cleaned for unprintable words before they went to press, and you get some notion of the chore a song collector had who was only a cowboy himself.

The second song important for me that night was ‘The Death of Jesse James.’ Two verses of it; just two. I got several additional verses some days later in the bunkhouse of the Craul and Jacobs cow spread west of Ringgold. And in Ringgold itself I got two more from an old cowpuncher, who I had been told was dripping with songs. I have noticed that the further you are from a gold strike, the richer it is. This old cowpuncher, and two other people in Ringgold who had been recommended to me as great singers, knew between them ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,’

‘ Clementine,’ several revival songs, two French love songs — and the two final verses of ‘The Death of Jesse James.’ A song-hunter had to pick up his gold in small hunks where he found it.

III

A lot of singing on the range had nothing to do with cowboy songs as such. In different camps I encountered railroad, mountain, river, and granger songs, as well as sticky-sweet sentimental ballads like ‘Mollie Lou, Sweet Mollie Mine,’ and ‘My Little Georgie May.’ Cowboys weren’t always singin’ about ‘ little dogies’ or ‘give me a home where the buffalo roam,’ and when they sang river songs it was generally something about running logs down a mountain stream. Railroad songs celebrated head-on collisions, or told how a brave conductor saved a train. Granger songs usually had something to do with a yoke of oxen, old Buck and Spot, and a boy who was tired of driving them to the plough and so quit home. These were a part of the singing West too, but I was mainly interested in songs that had all the elements of the range — the cow range, and its special codes and points of view.

It is generally thought that cowboys did a lot of singing around the herd at night to quiet them on the bed ground. I have been asked about this, and I’ll say that I have stood my share of night watches in fifty years and I seldom heard any singing of that kind. What you would hear as you passed your partner on guard would be a kind of low hum or whistle, and you wouldn’t know what it was. Just some old hymn tune, like as not — something to kill time and not bad enough to make the herd want to get up and run.

Cowboy songs, as I said, were often sung to old familiar airs. Failing these, there was a kind of standard monotonous tune used over and over that even uneducated fingers could pick out on the banjo. A young friend who has listened to me hum it says the tune looks like this in printed notes: —

Things that cowboys liked, things they hated, incidents of the here and reflections on the hereafter — these were the chief themes of their songs. Their ways were rough, but they knew gold from glitter when they saw it. They judged a man, not by his boasts, but by what he could and did do when the time came for action. They played hard practical jokes, but the best of them could ‘take it’ when their jokes backfired. No theme of cowboy balladry illustrates these characteristics better than the one incorporated in ‘The Educated Feller,’ ‘Cowboys Victimized,’ ‘The Zebra Dun,’ and others built around the same essential situation.

Who wrote the cowboy songs? The authorship of many of them is doubtful or unknown. Often the authors, if they hailed from the range direct, didn’t bother or care to acknowledge authorship. Thus ‘The Campfire Has Gone Out,’ which I heard when I was ranching in the San Andreas Mountains, was written, I believe, by Gene Rhodes; but, as far as I know, Gene himself never said so. ‘Hell in Texas’ is a popular ballad describing a supposed deal between the Lord and the Devil by which the latter acquired some land so bad that the Lord couldn’t use it, but perfectly suited to the Devil’s needs for a little hell on earth: he ‘put thorns on the cactus and horns on the toads . . . poisoned the feet of the centipede,’ and did more of the same — and called it Texas. At one time or another I picked up five versions of this song, each supposed to be by a different author; some of them say the place the Devil got hold of was Texas, others say New Mexico, depending on the writer’s partisanship. There was ‘Fightin’ Mad,’ too, a ballad about a cowboy who was offered ginger ale to drink. This I got at the annual Colorado Springs Roundup from Jean Beaumondy. Jean was then the champion trick girl roper of the world — she’s still good, according to accounts of a movie film in which she did her stuff less than a year ago.

‘Did you write the song, Jean?’ I asked her.

‘Oh, I was around when it was written, ‘ she said. And that’s all I ever could get out of her.

Sometimes a song lost its author and even changed its name as it passed from mouth to mouth. Henry Herbert Knibbs once brought me a cowboy song from southern Arizona, known there under the title ‘High-Chin Bob.’ Actually the song was written by Charles Badger Clark, Jr., and the original version appeared in his book, Sun and Saddle Leather, under the title, ‘The Glory Trail.’ A song of mine called ‘Nigger ‘Lasses ‘ had this four-line refrain: —

J. Frank Dobie once heard this song at Eagle Pass, Texas, sung by a darky singer, and Frank asked him where he got it. The singer said: ‘Ah don’ know, sah. A man named Mister Jack he wrote it — ah dunno.’

Authorship wasn’t reckoned very important — nothing to fight over. But when you did discover a song’s author, sometimes it was a surprise. The second night after I threw in with Speckles and Tom, we penned the horses on the outskirts of Gainesville and later hunted up a pasture to put them in for the night. While we were cooking supper a great tall ganglin’ swamp-angel moseyed into camp looking hungrier than a dieting deb. A swamp-angel was a fellow raised down in the swampy lands, maybe Louisiana or Arkansas. They all had chills and fever, ninety per cent of them chewed snuffsticks, and they generally looked like walking matches. This one seemed to be a fair sample of the breed. Seeing my little banjo lying on my bedroll, he asked if any of us could sing. No, we said, but sometimes we opened our mouths and noise came out.

‘Want me ter sing you a song?’

‘Sure!’ we said. So he picked up my banjo. And what a banjo-picker he was! He sang ‘Bucking Bronco’ —sang the whole song of five verses. What’s more, he knew the author’s name. Belle Starr, he said, wrote it.

I had met Belle several times in Dallas and Fort Worth. Now, I was told, she had a ranch at Younger’s Bend. Belle was one of the most famous of the women outlaws of the Southwest. A beautiful brunette, well educated, she wore guns and had a bunch of desperadoes working for her. She was running a holdout stable in Dallas, where stolen horses were fenced. But the horses came from the Indian Territory, which made it all right; nobody in Texas would bother her. All the cowpunchers went there to put up their horses when they came to town. Belle sang in the church choir, played the piano, and was a ‘sassiety’ lady in those days. That she was also a song writer was news and quite a surprise to me. But Belle was an original, a product of the time and the region; and her end, when it came, was tragically in keeping with her life. Returning from a trip to Fort Smith, she was two miles from her ranch at Younger’s Bend when she was shot in the back by one of her tenants with whom she had quarreled, a man wanted in Florida on a murder charge but afraid to meet Belle face to face. . . .

‘Bucking Bronco’ went like this, after it was expurgated: —

I broke horses for old man Waggoner in Paul’s Valley for some time, picking up what songs I could; and when I felt I had enough cash ahead to last a spell, I saddled up Gray Dog, packed Ample, and started drifting and song-hunting again, south this time towards Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and points farther south and west.

IV

Cowboy songs did not always reach me through cowboys. I took them where I found them, from all sorts and kinds of people. Walking up Main Street in Fort Worth one morning, I heard the air of ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ through the doors of the Silver Dollar saloon. I went in and found a girl singing a cowboy song for a drink. Her audience soon left and she sat at a table with me. She knew only one song, but it was a good one for the notebook — ‘Buster Goes A-Courtin’.’ In Dallas I camped in a pecan grove outside the Fair Grounds near a group of Irish gypsies who drew crowds by fomenting horse races, and here I picked up ‘My Pet Horse’ and ‘Ridin’ Jane’ — not quite cowboy songs, but good enough to go into the notebook. ‘Buckskin Joe’ I first heard in the public square of Waco.

South of Waco one night I rode in the dark. It was a night for riding! I saw a city on fire below the edge of the world, and presently the moon popped up and made the whole State of Texas so bright you could read a newspaper. A campfire flickered, and I rode in where three men were camped. They were dressed no differently than other mounted Texans — no uniforms, no brass. They invited me to get down and camp. I unpacked, unsaddled, hobbled out my horses. Seeing my banjo, they asked me to play. I did. One of the three responded with a song, a new one to me. That there was such a song I knew, but this was my first hearing of it. ‘The Texas Rangers’ it was; and it was a ranger who sang it. These three were part of Captain Hughes’s famous force, on their way to Fort McKavett, they told me, to investigate a report of trouble between sheepmen and cattlemen.

Followers of many trades were found in the cow country, many of them with songs on their lips. From San Antonio I headed into mesquite-and-cactus country. I reached Devil’s River four miles south of the town of Juno, and found a strange assemblage of wagons, all manned by Mexicans. They invited me to get down and try a cup of coffee.

At this camp one of the younger Mexicans sang me four verses of a song in Spanish called ‘El Rio Rey’ — ‘The River King.’ It was a ballad of a palomino stud that roamed the range uncaught, untamed. I never found anybody who knew more of the original than the four verses sung me by this Mexican. But some months afterwards I was lying in my bedroll at two or three in the morning, and words to complete the song suddenly came to me. I slid out of bed, got my little notebook out of my chaps pocket, and wrote four new verses in English. I translated the four from the Spanish, and in that way completed the ballad. Such was the mongrel ancestry of some cowboy songs.

It was at Toyah near the New Mexico line, from another cow-country character, ‘Sally’ White, that I get four verses of ‘The Great Roundup’: —

‘Sally’ was no girl despite his name, but was so called from his fondness for singing a song with that title. No, Mr. White was no girl. I remember the night he got drunk in Pecos town. They had a law against wearing six-shooters within the city limits. ‘Sally’ tied his gun to the end of his rope, thus in his opinion complying with the law, and went all over town dragging the rope and yelling, ‘Don’t step on my tail, boys! Open the door an’ let me an’ my tail through!’ His song, attributed to the father of a Captain Roberts of the Texas Rangers, ends up: —

V

Cowboy songs, as I have said, were full of the vernacular of the range, and it wasn’t always parlor talk. I vividly remember sitting in the ranch house on Crow Flat with old Jim Brownfield during the latter stages of my trip, and hearing him give the entire range version of ‘The Top Hand.’ The theme — ridicule of a cowboy too big for his boots — was a scorcher in itself, and the words of the song would have burned the reader’s eyeballs if printed as Jim sang it. I expurgated it and had to change even the title, and the song has appeared exactly as I rendered it in all books of cowboy songs published since: —

The same is true of Belle Starr’s ‘The Bucking Bronco’ and of many other songs.

In fact, I have found that cowboy songs have their adventures after they get into print as well as before. I closed my first little paper-covered book with a ballad I wrote myself, called ‘Speckles.’ There were eight verses as I wrote it, but the printer lost part of the copy and printed only six. Some time later a very learned professor brought out a big book of cowboy songs which he claimed to have collected with great labor, and he printed my abbreviated ‘Speckles’ (without credit), but changed the name to ‘Freckles’ and called it a fragment that he had picked up.

Another song of mine also had a rather checkered history. In 1898, nearly ten years after the trip I am writing about, I helped trail a herd of O cattle from Chimney Lake, New Mexico, to Higgins, Texas. There were eight of us in the crew. One night I sat by the campfire with a stub of pencil and an old paper bag and wrote the story of little Joe, the horse wrangler, a Texas stray who had left home, he told us, and struck out for himself because his daddy had married again and his new ma beat him. The boss ‘sorter liked the little stray somehow,’ and took him on as a hand. One night in a thunderstorm everybody turned out to check a stampede. The cattle ran a ways, but were headed, and when they were milling and kind of quieted down, one of the hands was missing — our little Texas stray. He was found next morning in a wash twenty feet deep, under his horse, Rocket: —

I sang the song to the men who were with me on that trail trip. After our return I sang it for the first time in any man’s hearing — save on that trip —in Uncle Johnny Martin’s store and saloon at Weed, New Mexico. From that time on it was passed along by word of mouth. I led off my first little book with it, but didn’t sign it; none of the songs in that book were signed, though five of the twenty-four were my own compositions. In the course of time ‘Little Joe, the Wrangler’ became one of the most widely sung and best liked of cowboy songs. I have no idea how often it has been sung over the radio in the last few years. I do know that it has been put on phonograph records and more than 375,000 of them have been sold — and the author of the song not richer by a penny for having written it.

VI

A morning in March 1890, just a year after I started out, found me back on my home range not far from the place where I had encountered Nigger Add and his chuck-wagon camp. I had but twenty-five miles more to go to the old Carrizozo ranch, better known as the Bar W. I reflected on the miles I had ridden (more than 1500 of them), the handful of songs I had collected, the nights and days I had passed in cow country new to me, the hands I had shaken, the men ‘good’ and ‘bad’ I had come to know. I had spent some time with ‘Old Perk,’ who once dug a pit to trap predacious bears, and when his dog fell into the pit while it was occupied by a big trapped bear Old Perk followed feet first with no weapon but a butcher knife to save his dog. A braver deed, wholly without audience, it would be hard to find. Old Perk killed the bear and saved the dog, but received terrible scars which he wore to the end of his life; he was so sensitive about his appearance that he would never come to town except for necessary grub and then only after dark. I had eaten and bunked, too, with a man who made his home in a cave in the Guadalupes. He was ‘wanted,’ whether for murder or horse stealing I did not know, and he certainly rode horses with too many different brands to be honest; but he was as likable a man as you could meet.

Cowboys didn’t judge too harshly. The best of them would do to ride with anywhere, and the worst weren’t all bad. ‘Show me a perfect man and I’ll show you Christ’ was their tolerant attitude. With such men I had lived and would live, and the time did not seem to me ill spent. Next spring, I thought as I jogged along, I’ll go again: this time through western New Mexico, and on through Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming. . . .

You would ride those ranges in vain today to find men who ride and make songs and sing them in the old free larruping spirit and under like conditions: —

But the country, and the life as it was, survive authentically in the balladry, crude though it may have been, that grew out of the very lives the cowboys led and the troubles they had; and our literature is richer for it.

Late afternoon brought sight of the cottonwoods around the old Bar W. Ample, the pack horse, had been raised there. He recognized home, and passed me at a fast trot. Gray Dog, too, commenced fishin’ at the bit. Hi, boss! Want an old hand for the roundup? Our dust is arrivin’.