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The Cowboy Song as Art Song

In 1882, Buffalo Bill Cody presented the first of what became a 30-year run of variously named “Wild West Shows,” adding the excitement of a circus-like atmosphere to an already alluring image and culture. Western films, with or without singing cowboys and the phenomenon of country and Western music promoted the growth and capitalized on the popularity of Western culture. Portrayed as an indomitable, solitary figure, the pre-modern cowboy of fiction combined the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Samson, the virtue of Sir Galahad, and the valor of Roland. During the era of the “singing cowboy” one might add that he also had a bit of Orpheus’s talent, as well. The reality, of course, differs. To begin with, there is the name “cowboy,” a word that ranch hands rarely used. As historian Guy Logsdon points out, they referred to themselves as “punchers, cowpunchers, cowhands, cowpokes, buckaroos, wranglers, vaqueros, waddies, cowmen, and other less sophisticated, but colorful, sobriquets.”1 Furthermore, cowboys were more ethnically diverse than they often have been portrayed in movies, books, magazines, on television, and through other sources. In Cowboys of the Americas, Richard W. Stratta estimates that during the peak period of the trail drives from Texas to the North (1860s-1880s), only about two-thirds of the cowboys involved were white. Nearly all of the rest were Mexican, Mexican American, or African American.2 Finally, the epic clashes that entertained readers and audiences for generations were far removed from the actual daily routine of the typical cowboy’s life, which included long hours of tedious labor, boredom, paltry pay, crippling injuries and fatalities resulting from work or hostilities with others, and exposure to life-threatening extremes of weather. Despite this, the American cowboy has enjoyed mythic status for generations. His songs remain so firmly embedded in our folk traditions that most of us not only remember fragments of at least a few of them but find that they have the power to take us back to a time during our childhood when we aspired to membership in the fraternity of cowboys. In spite of the cowboy’s popularity and the enduring appeal of his songs, few twentiethcentury composers in the classical tradition transformed the music that cowboys sang into “art” songs. (According to The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th edition, an “art song” may be defined as a “song intended for the concert repertory, as distinct from a folk or popular song.”3) This is important because in the early twentieth century, when nationalism in music was a very popular topic of conversation, cowboy songs would have been a logical repertoire from which to draw in creating identifiably American music. The Cowboy Song as Art Song