Cowboy Ballads by Myra Hull February 1939 (Vol. 1), pages 35 to 60. Transcribed by lhn; digitized with permission of the Kansas Historical Society. ALL the cowboy songs in this collection are genuine; that is, they have actually been sung by ranchers and cowboys on the range, along the trail, in the night herder's lone vigils on the prairie, or in the cowboy's moments of relaxation around the campfire and in the dance hall in the open cow town at the end of the trail. None of the songs here recorded have been borrowed from other collections.

Some of them I heard as a child, as they were sung by my cowboy brothers, by hired hands, or by the cattlemen who frequently stayed the night at our homestead in Butler county, twenty miles from Jesse Chisholm's trading post, on the old Chisholm trail; others were set down for me as remembered by old time cowboys of the 1870's, such as N. Power; several of the most picturesque ones were contributed by my nephew, Dr. Hull Alden Cook, as they are still sung on the ranches of Colorado, Arizona, and Wyoming.

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I have been inspired by such ballad collectors as N. Howard Thorp, Dr. Louise Pound, Miss Margaret Larkin, and John and Alan Lomax, as well as the numerous contributors to the Journal of American Folk-Lore.

But all these collections have been used only for purposes of comparison and comment. In every instance, I have observed the tradition of folk-ballad collectors in recording songs exactly as they were sung, being careful not to yield to the temptation to improve upon the text or to synthesize the variants in order to produce an attractive composite song. Cowboy songs are ballads; that is, they are stories in song. Furthermore, many of them are folk ballads, in a very real, if not in a technical sense.

One of the tests of the Old world folk ballad was its anonymity, which was acquired through centuries of oral transmission until its origin was lost in antiquity. Cowboy songs are comparatively young, so that one might expect the authors to be known.

Some few of them are, but many of the origins have been obscured by word-of-mouth transmission, as they were for the most part not written down but were disseminated by the singing cowboys as they went up the trail or from one ranch to another. Moreover, although the themes of most of the cowboy songs were indigenous, the cowboy had the habit of borrowing a song or a poem, adapting it to the occasion, and with joyous abandon, adding to it endlessly. The most popular of these songs have countless variants, (35 36 KANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY many of unconscionable length.

Much of this re-creation has communal aspects, as the examples will illustrate later. In composing his song the cowboy might purloin only a line, as in the 'Come, all ye' pattern of the 'Texas Ranger'; sometimes a stanza would be lifted bodily; and in at least one instance, 'The Dying Cowboy,' a whole song has been parodied. Some of the tunes are likewise borrowed and may be traced to German folk songs, Irish airs, English and Scotch ballads, popular American songs, or even hymn tunes. Of most of the apparently original tunes as well as the words, it is next to impossible to discover the composer. Whatever their origin, the cowboy has by his singing and his recreations made them his own, and has unconsciously established a norm with more or less clearly defined characteristics. The cowboy vernacular, the marked accent and verve of the rhythm, the peculiar moods and themes, tend to give the ballads a certain distinctive flavor by which the collector learns to test their genuineness. And when all allowances have been made for borrowings, there remains a mass of material that impresses one with its freshness, its invigorating atmosphere, its dramatic quality, and its power to revive a real world in which the cowboy was the dominant figure.