WHEN I went first to college in Texas I carried in my trunk, along with my pistol and other implements of personal warfare, a little manuscript roll of cowboy songs. My father’s farm and small ranch was located on the Chisholm Trail, over which many thousand Longhorn cattle were driven to Dodge City, Kansas; sometimes on to Montana and the Dakotas. Especially at night when lying awake, I had heard the cowboys sing to the cattle “bedded down” near our home. These songs and others like them were also current among a number of neighbor boys, older than myself, who each spring went on the round-up and afterwards trailed a herd of cattle to a Northern market. They brought new songs back with them for the entertainment of their friends.
On one occasion I exhibited my store of cowboy songs to a somewhat startled Texas English professor. I was told politely that they had no value. So I put them away until I became, years afterwards, a student in Harvard. There, during a course in American literature taught by Professor Barrett Wendell, I was encouraged to believe that the songs were worth preserving. In order to aid my work in collecting, he and Professor George Lyman Kittredge sent out to many newspapers of the country a letter asking that all types of folk songs be forwarded to me. Later on, after I had been appointed a Traveling Sheldon Fellow “to investigate American folk songs,” Professors Wendell and Kittredge were joined in a second appeal to the public by Dean L. B. R. Briggs and Professor Fred N. Robinson. Such sponsorship resulted, during the three years I held the Sheldon fellowship, in the accumulation of a great mass of material.
Two books of cowboy songs were issued from material secured principally in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and other states where I visited and recorded tunes in saloons and on remote ranches. Several thousand pages of unused manuscript were filed away. The present book is a direct outgrowth of the collection which was then made under Harvard patronage.
Whatever its fortune, it goes to a public whose interest in folk material is much greater than in 1910, when Cowboy Songs was published. At that time no publisher would print the cowboy song music, except a few illustrative examples. Records of this music had been made on wax cylinders, which, alas! have crumbled with age. However, the music then set down and printed, long unnoticed, is now often heard over the radio. It has been said that the song “Home on the Range” was the most popular tune of the first half of 1933. The music for that song was obtained twenty-three years ago from the Negro proprietor of a low drinking and gambling dive in the slum district of San Antonio. It remained safely buried in Cowboy Songs for nearly a quarter of a century. The publication of this volume is, therefore, largely due to the unflagging interest of two men. So long as Professor Barrett Wendell lived, he gave my work his cordial support, and through the resulting association I, in turn, gave him my everlasting affection. To me, as well as to all who collect folk songs, or who write of this literature, Professor Kittredge is ready with advice, help, and, when needed, forceful admonition. These words are set down in grateful recognition and appreciation.
Many other people have helped to make this book possible. Entitled perhaps to first mention is Miss Mary Gresham, a competent musician and teacher of Washington, who transcribed from aluminum, wax, and celluloid records made this summer much of the Negro music in this book, and, in addition, other songs from singing and from rough manuscript notation. Edward Neighbors Waters, Assistant in the Music Division, Library of Congress, wrote out the music for approximately fifty songs, principally from singing. Other members of the Music Division, notably Carl Engel, its Chief, Oliver Strunk, Assistant Chief, and Frank Megill, Assistant, were constantly courteous and helpful. None of the faults of the book or responsibilities growing out of it, however, are chargeable to these persons.
To Mrs. Janice Reed Lit of Haverford, Pennsylvania, whose helpfulness in many ways has been constant since the book was first definitely planned; to Professors Howard W. Odum, Guy Johnson, and A. P. Hudson, all of the University of North Carolina, that is, along with near-by Duke University, the folk song collecting center of the South; to Professor Arthur G. Brodeur of the University of California; to Professor Joseph W. Clokey of Pomona College; to Frank Dobie of the University of Texas; to Professor E. C. Beck, Central State Teachers College, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan; to Louise and Cletus Oakley of Brown University; to Professor Lucy Lockwood Hazard of Mills College; to “Slim” Critchlow, Forest Ranger and soloist for the Utah Buckaroos; to Dean L. B. R. Briggs of Harvard University; to Professors Josiah Combs and Newton Gaines of Texas Christian University; to Professor George E. Hastings of the University of Arkansas; to Sigmund Spaeth, New York City; to Professor George Pullen Jackson, Vanderbilt University; to Sam P. Bayard, State College, Pennsylvania; to Mr. H. H. Fuson, Harlan, Kentucky; to Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Callaway, Comanche, Texas; to Carl Sandburg, Harbert, Michigan; to Professor and Mrs. Harold William Thompson, New York State College for Teachers; to Miss Dorothy Scarborough, Columbia University; to Major and Mrs. Isaac Spalding, Washington, D. C.; to Professor H. M. Belden, University of Missouri; to John A. Lomax, Jr.; to Miss Martha Harrold, Memphis, Tennessee; to John Lang Sinclair, New York City; to Shirley Lomax Mansell and Bess Brown Lomax, Lubbock, Texas—to all these, special thanks are due for special favors.
Along with these in point of service I must place that group of Negro “boys” who this summer, cheerfully and with such manifest friendliness, gave up for the time their crap and card games, their prayer meetings, their much needed Sunday and evening rest, in order to sing for Alan and me—that group whose real names we omit for no other reason than to print the substituted picturesque nicknames. Those black “boys” of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee by their singing removed any doubt we may have had that Negro folk songs are without a rival in the United States. To Iron Head, Clear Rock, Chin Shooter, Lead Belly, Mexico, Black Samson, Lightnin’, Can’t Make It, Butter Ball, Ing Shing, Scrap Iron, Bowlegs, Tight Eyes, Double Head, Bull Face, Log Wagon, Creepin’ Jesus, Long Distance, Burn Down, Steam Shovel, Rat, Black Rider, Barrel House, Spark Plug, to two “girls,” Dink and Bat, and others who helped without giving their names, and to many another among the thousands we saw, in happy memory tinged with sadness, I offer grateful thanks.
As this book represents twenty-five years of desultory collecting, I cannot but fail to omit to mention names that should be included in the list to whom is also due, and who herewith receive, my gratitude:
Miss Virginia Brown, Dallas, Texas; Joanna Colcord, author of Roll and Go; Professor John H. Cox, University of West Virginia; Professor Frank Davidson, Indiana University; Captain A. E. Dingle, West Bermuda; Professor Horace A. Eaton, Syracuse University; Professor Milton Ellis, University of Maine; Captain R. J. Flanagan, Manager of Central State Farm, Texas; Colonel Frederick Stuart Greene, Commissioner of Public Works, Albany, New York; Judge Louis B. Hart, Buffalo, New York; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Superintendent R. L. Himes, General Manager Louisiana prison system; Captain H. J. Jackson, Manager Darrington State Farm, Texas; George Milburn, formerly of the University of Oklahoma; Professor and Mrs. George M. Miller, University of Idaho; Bertha K. Millette, Washington, D. C.; John J. Niles, co-author Songs My Mother Never Taught Me; Miss Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, New York University; Professor L. W. Payne, University of Texas; F. E. Peyton, Greenwich, Connecticut; Miss Louise Pound, University of Nebraska; Allen Prothro, Chattanooga, Tennessee; Augustus H. Shearer, Buffalo, New York; Frank Shay, author of Drawn from the Wood, Provincetown, Massachusetts; Peter Smith, publisher, New York; Manager O. G. Tann, Parchman, Mississippi; Professor W. H. Thomas, College Station, Texas; Henry Trevelyan, Wiergate, Texas; Professor R. P. Utter, University of California; R. V. Utter, Clayton, Missouri; John T. Vance, Library of Congress; Stewart Edward White; Professor Newman I. White, Duke University; Owen Wister, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; Professor Homer E. Woodbridge, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; Miss Louise Wyman, author of Lonesome Tunes; Miss Jean Thomas, author of Devil’s Ditties, Ashland, Kentucky.
J. A. L.