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Show as a cowboy taught [Thorp] that many great recitations of the song-stories were performed with great skill and gusto by cowboys with limited musical ability," suggesting that the words, i.e. the poem, were likely the appealing and important attraction for the working cowboy, (p. 128) Secondly, it suggests that whether or not the author of a song or text was known (in some cases Thorp did know authorship because it was indicated in his 1921, second edition) was irrelevant to the cowboys who adopted it and absorbed it into their traditions. The next important collection of cowboy songs, produced by John A. Lomax in 1910, was Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Lomax's collection contained what he felt to be the more lyrical, occupational songs from the first generation of cowboys. White explains that because of space restrictions, most of the selections Lomax included were printed as text only, even though he had collected music to go with them, and as with Thorp's first edition, only one author, (a friend of Lomax's), was identified. This was most likely because "Lomax considered most of the others folk music, songs originated by forgotten cowpunchers, gold miners, stage drivers or other unknown versifiers, and passed around from singer to singer, often being changed in the process, before being captured on the printed page." (p. 200; p. 58) In 1919, with his second publication entitled Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camps, Lomax focused on the narrative art of the second generation of cowboys. In this collection "he made a distinction between songs that emerged from and were sung by the cowboys and poems that were composed by poets printed in newspapers, magazines and books." (Logsdon, p 128) Included were poems previously published in anthology form by their authors such as selections from: William Lawrence Chittenden's Ranch Verses (1893), Charles Badger Clark's Sun and Saddle Leather (1912), and Arthur Chapman's Out Where the West Begins (1916). As White concludes, the collection "contains no tunes, and many of the poems probably never had actually been sung by cowboys or anyone else." (p. 200) Yet this is not to say that some of these same poems were not later performed with music around the campfire or that because of their authorship they were not embraced by cowboy performers and ultimately modified as they passed from one performer to the next. In fact, in some instances that process of transmission into the folk realm has been almost too complete. At one time, Badger Clark, author of "A Cowboy's Prayer," had in his collection more than sixty postcards that had published his poem with the notation "author unknown." Similarly, Curley Fletcher, author of Rhymes of the Roundup (1917) which included his popular poem, "The Strawberry Roan," "was in the unenviable position of having written a poem good enough to be turned into a regional hit tune, only to see it disseminated widely by word-of-mouth before it was published by an established music house with that all-important copyright notice Cowboy Poetry From Utah 11 |