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Show the fact that it became one of the songs that [years later] was sung at the farewell parties held in Monticello for the boys summoned from that locality to the armed forces of the United States in World War II. Keller, who later became Utah's Seventh District Judge, raised livestock for thirty years in the Monticello area and throughout San Juan County. After his retirement, he moved northward to Price where he raised horses. According to folklorist Hector Lee, an avid collector of Utah folklore, when Keller died in 1976, at the age of 83, "Blue Mountain" was performed at his funeral. ("Blue Mountain in Song and Saga" Family Heritage Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1979) Although Keller was a part-time rancher, not a working cowboy, and in some ways his song might more appropriately be defined as local history than as cowboy poetry, both its style and the method in whjch it was adopted locally and later widely circulated, are similar to other well-known cowboy songs. For instance, the lyrics to "Blue Mountain" were composed with a specific melody, borrowed from another song, in the author's mind. There is some confusion about which tune Keller actually used as in one documented history he mentions the Texas cowboy song while in a written correspondence to the Fifes he says the melody "was suggested to me by a little known trail song entitled 'Mother, Don't Weep for Me.'" Perhaps these songs are one and the same but even if they are different pieces, the words to the song were composed and possibly modified to fit a pre-selected tune, much like the process used by D. J. O'Malley for several of his published poems. (Git Along, Little Dogies, p. 83, 87) Similarly, the fact that "Blue Mountain" was extremely popular with local residents and that it was "sung at almost every public, social gathering," substantiates its acceptance by the community, an all-important element in the process of becoming a valid expression of folk culture. It was at one of these community events, in 1946, that Utah's well-known "pioneer" folklorists, Austin and Alta Fife, first encountered "Blue Mountain." The Fifes, who "represent the finest of the cowboy scholars today," and whose work in collecting and publishing cowboy songs and verse is considered to be the most significant since Lomax's 1910 collection (Logsdon, p. 130), were attending a rodeo in the Monticello area at which they heard a rendition of "Blue Mountain." (Interestingly, they later learned that the song was performed by local singer, Loyle Bailey, whose father Nephi, the former justice of the peace, was included in the song under his nickname, Zapatero.) At that time, the Fifes were teaching at Occidental College in Los Angeles and upon their return home they shared "Blue Mountain" with a receptive music department. Subsequently, they included the song in both scholarly publications and cowboy anthologies and from there it was adopted into the repertoire of several popular folksingers. Today, the song is sung and enjoyed from southern California to Maryland. As a result of the scholarly work of the Fifes, "Blue Mountain" has Cowboy Poetry From Utah 21 |
