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Show joy or sorrow to groups of relatives and friends or acquaintances His poetic idiom is stamped with expressions describing group feeling and thought. (Western Folklore, XII: 242-248, 1953) The only real difference between the nineteenth century American cowboy poet and the folk poet, that Pearce and others have defined, is that the cowboy poet, as a result of his place in modern history, often composed and transmitted his expression of the cowboy culture on paper for a reading public. As a result, he was not necessarily anonymous and his work more quickly reached a much larger audience than it would have solely through oral transmission. Cowboying, and the composition of cowboy poetry which resulted, really had its heyday in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War, railroad lines were extended to the plains of mid-America providing shipping points to which cowboys herded large numbers of cattle, trail-driving them from rangelands in Texas and Kansas. It was on these long journeys that entertainment activities such as cowboy music and cowboy poetry were born. Work songs, like the spirituals sung by slaves on southern plantations, had always been a part of America's history, so it was not unusual that cowboys also sang lyrical, occupational songs. In "The Cowboy's Bawdy Music," Guy Logsdon suggests that during the era of the first generation cowboys, a few songs such as "The Old Chis-holm Trail," which consists of a variety of short stanzas and exists in a number of versions, were indeed community composed and orally transmitted work songs. (The Cowboy: Six-Shooters, Songs and Sex, p. 131, 1976) But as Utah folklorist Austin Fife explains in the foreword to White's Git Along, Little Dogies, "In the 80s and 90s [song] texts began to appear in plains and western newspapers, in farm and cattlemen's magazines, and even in a few periodicals distributed nationwide." (p. xi, 1975) These second generation, oftentimes published pieces were more narrative in style than the lyrical songs that had preceded them. Song texts, published in periodicals such as The Pacific Monthly, Miles City, Montana's Stock Growers' Journal or in newspapers like The Arizona Globe, functioned in the same way as had British and American broadsides which had been popular since the sixteenth century and were often in the form of "crudely printed single sheets containing the lyrics for a new song and the name of a familiar tune to which it might be sung." (J. Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore, p. 134, 1968) The process of publishing a text to a song, or in other words publishing a poem, along with a suggested tune, was one with which Montana's well-known cowboy poet, D.J. O'Malley was familiar. In the chapter on O'Malley in John I. White's definitive study of cowboy music, Git Along, Little Dogies, White reports that O'Malley "told me he wrote ['A Cowboy's Death'] to fit the tune of an old song called 'The Lake of Pontchartrain' " (p. 83), and that the poem entitled "The Tenderfoot" or "The Horse Wrangler" was written to go with a popular Irish American comic tune composed by vaudeville star Pat Rooney entitled "The Day I Played Baseball." (p. 87). Certainly Cowboy Poetry From Utah |