A type of song describing cowboys and their life. Such songs began to appear in popular newspapers, as broadsides, in magazines (such as stockmen’s journals), and in songbooks in the late 19th century; they became increasingly romanticized when they were taken over by Tin Pan Alley songwriters (such as Billy Hill) and by Hollywood composers. They are generally written in ballad style, but are melodically and structurally indebted to traditional popular, folk and religious songs. The first significant collections were N.H. Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboy (1908) and J.A. Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910, rev. and enlarged 3/1938/R). The first commercial recordings of cowboy songs were probably those made by Charles Nabell for Okeh in 1924; Charles T. Sprague, known as the ‘Original Singing Cowboy’, made a very successful recording of When the Work’s all Done this Fall for Victor in 1925. Other early cowboy singers were the Cartwright Brothers, Goebel Reeves (the ‘Texas Drifter’), Jules Verne Allen (‘Longhorn Luke’) and Harry McClintock, but the true union of cowboy song and Country music did not come until after 1934, when Gene Autry began his career as a singing cowboy in Hollywood films. He popularized such songs as Back in the Saddle Again and Riding Down the Canyon; he and the singers he influenced, such as Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and the Sons of the Pioneers, did much to implant the romantic image of the cowboy in country music.
F.G. Hoeptner: Authentic Cowboys and their Western Folksongs, RCA LPV522 (1965) [disc notes]
B.C. Malone: Country Music, U.S.A.: a Fifty-Year History (Austin, 1968, 2/1985)
A.E. Fife and A.S. Fife, eds.: Cowboy and Western Songs: a Comprehensive Anthology (New York, 1969)
J. White: Git Along, Little Dogies: Songs and Songmakers of the American West (Urbana, IL, 1975)
D.B. Green: Country Roots: the Origins of Country Music (New York, 1976)
J. Tuska: The Filming of the West (Garden City, NY, 1976)
D.B. Green: ‘The Singing Cowboy: an American Dream’, Journal of Country Music, vii/2 (1978), 4–61
C. Seemann: Back in the Saddle Again, NW314-15 (1984) [disc notes]
L. Clayton and R. Chazaretta: Cowboy and Gaucho Songs: a Comparison (Dallas, 1985)
P. O’Neill: ‘“Like a Lone Bawling Calf’’: Some Musical Style Traits of Recent Cowboy Songs’, Canadian Folklore, vii (1985), 149–67
M. Fenster: ‘Preparing the Audience, Informing the Performers: John A. Lomax and Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads’, American Music, vii/3 (1989), 260–77
J.B. Tinsley: For a Cowboy has to Sing (Orlando, FL, 1991)
B.C. Malone: Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens, GA, 1993)
D. Edwards: Classic Cowboy Songs (Salt Lake City, 1994)
BILL C. MALONE