LOMAX, JOHN A., and LOMAX, ALAN. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, Macmillan, New York, 1938. This is a much added-to and revised form of Lomax's 1910 collection, under the same title. It is the most complete of all anthologies. More than any other man, John A. Lomax is responsible for having made cowboy songs a part of the common heritage of America. His autobiographic Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (Macmillan, 1947) is in quality far above the jingles that most cowboy songs are.
Missouri, as no other state, gave to the West and Southwest. Much of Missouri is still more southwestern in character than much of Oklahoma. For a full collection, with full treatment, of the ballads and songs, including bad-man and cowboy songs, sung in the Southwest there is nothing better than Ozark Folksongs, collected and edited by Vance Randolph, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, 1946-50. An unsurpassed work in four handsome volumes.
OWENS, WILLIAM A. Texas Folk Songs, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1950. A miscellany of British ballads, American ballads, "songs of doleful love," etc. collected in Texas mostly from country people of Anglo-American stock. Musical scores for all the songs.
The Texas Folklore Society has published many cowboy songs. Its publications Texas and Southwestern Lore (1927) and Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd (1928) contain scores, with music and anecdotal interpretations. Other volumes contain other kinds of songs, including Mexican.
THORP, JACK (N. Howard). Songs of the Cowboys, Boston, 1921. OP. Good, though limited, anthology, without music and with illuminating comments. A pamphlet collection that Thorp privately printed at Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908, was one of the first to be published. Thorp had the perspective of both range and civilization. He was a kind of troubadour himself. The opening chapter, "Banjo in the Cow Camps," of his posthumous reminiscences, Pardner of the Wind, is delicious.
23. Horses: Mustangs and Cow Ponies
THE WEST WAS DISCOVERED, battled over, and won by men on horseback. Spanish conquistadores saddled their horses in Vera Cruz and rode until they had mapped the continents from the Horn to Montana and from the Floridas to the harbors of the Californias. The padres with them rode on horseback, too, and made every mission a horse ranch. The national dance of Mexico, the Jarabe, is an interpretation of the clicking of hoofs and the pawing and prancing of spirited horses that the Aztecs noted when the Spaniards came. Likewise, the chief contribution made by white men of America to the folk songs of the world—the cowboy songs—are rhythmed to the walk of horses.
Astride horses introduced by the conquistadores to the Americas, the Plains Indians became almost a separate race from the foot-moving tribes of the East and the stationary Pueblos of the Rockies. The men that later conquered and corralled these wild-riding Plains Indians were plainsmen on horses and cavalrymen. The earliest American explorers and trappers of both Plains and Rocky Mountains went out in the saddle. The first industrial link between the East and the West was a mounted pack train beating out the Santa Fe Trail. On west beyond the end of this trail, in Spanish California, even the drivers of oxen rode horseback. The first transcontinental express was the Pony Express.
Outlaws and bad men were called "long riders." The Texas Ranger who followed them was, according to his own proverb, "no better than his horse." Booted sheriffs from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to the Hole in the Wall in the Big Horn Mountains lived in the saddle. Climactic of all the riders rode the cowboy, who lived with horse and herd.