SING, COWBOY, SING!
A silvery moon, a sleeping herd, a lonely cowboy riding night guard, crooning a soft cowboy song to soothe the cattle in the long hours before dawn. Such is the ingrained image of the singing cowboy, fixed in our collective imagination by a thousand stories, songs, books and films.
Did it really happen? Probably not much. To date most cowboys do not sing in the saddle, but the tradition has a germ of truth that grew into a natural phenomenon in the 1930s and ’40s, with such legendary singing and acting stars as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers taking the tradition to new heights.
Wherever people have gathered in semi-isolation, a folk music tradition has taken root. In centuries past folklorists and musicologists culled together collections of sea chanteys, lumberjack tunes and the like. By the early 20th century folklorist John Avery Lomax and song collector Nathan Howard “Jack” Thorp had each published collections of cowboy songs. But the tradition was well established by then, harking back to amateur poetry published in stockmen’s journals in the late 19th century and set to music by cowhands with time on their hands.
