The Cowboy Playlist
I talk to my Dad a lot on the phone these days since my Mom has passed. He most likes to talk about music and food. Last week he brought up the song "I Ride an Old Paint" (The Weavers version).
He wanted me to look up the lyrics on my phone while we were talking because he wanted to explain to me what all the cowboy jargon meant, particularly in this verse:
I'll ride the old paint, lead the old Dan
go to Montana to throw the hoolian,
I'll feed 'em in the coulees, water in the draw
Tails are all matted, their backs are all raw.
He talked about the term hoolian (catching horse rope, as opposed to the lasso and the lariat and quite frankly, I'm still confused about the differences), the word coulee versus the word draw (apparently a matter of depth, ravines or ditches full of water). On the mesa near Roy and Solano there were mostly only draws and he told me a story about being 11 years old and having to quickly jump off his horse or be crushed when his horse decided to lay down in a draw on the ranch. He wasn't strong enough to pull the horse out so he just had to sit there and wait for the horse to be done. My Dad has a million stories about being left to his own devices and getting into near-death jams.The gun stories alone.
Anyway, my Dad liked The Weavers version of this song and so it was on this day I learned he was a Pete Seeger fan.
He wanted to know who wrote the song so I mosey'd on over to Wikipedia which told us this was a song from Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag where the poet Sandburg collected folk songs from all over the United States. This particular song Sandburg learned during a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It came to him from the poets Margaret Larkin and Lynn Riggs. Lynn Riggs was one of New Mexico's "tuberculosis sanitarium" poets of the 1920s/30s. People came to the Southwest for the dry air and never left. Riggs and Larkin claimed to have heard it from a cowboy.
That led to my Dad trying to remember what old songs his own father would often whistle while he worked in the garage.
"She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" (Pete Seeger version)
Chicken and dumplings! My grandmother had a great chicken and noodles recipe.
We looked up the author of this song, too, and it's another one of Carl Sandburg's Songbag songs.
Which is related and not related to the fact that I'm working on a poetry podcass and for that I happened to be reading an essay (also last week) about the rivalry between Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. The essay also covered Carl Sandburg's collection of American folk songs for his The American Songbag project. The essay, written by Paul Muldoon from A New Literary History of America (edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers), insinuates that Sandburg (although forgotten now in the shadow of The Great Robert Frost and decades of academic repression of the leftist poetry) might have had a larger contribution to American culture with his song rescues than Frost did with his poems. Muldoon traces a line between Sandburg and Bob Dylan, who made a trip to visit Sandburg in his home before he died.
Poetry studies and music studies come around to each other all the time for me. But not often in the same week.
The other song my Dad said my grandfather loved to whistle was "Oh My Darling" and here's Pete Seeger's version of that.
This whole conversation reminded me I once made a playlist for my Dad for Father's Day. It contained my grandfather's (his Dad's) favorite songs when my grandfather was a young man. My grandfather had a paper notebook and he had written down verses in it. Initially my parents thought these were poems and gave the notebook to me. I started to transcribe the notebook around 2014 and realized they were actually song lyrics to old Spanish and cowboy folk songs.
So I found online versions and burned them into a mix-tape CD for my Dad.
My grandfather spent his career in the Indian Service and my parents thought this notebook might have been created from when he was a forest ranger and firefighter on the Jicarilla Reservation in northern New Mexico. He would have spent days alone camping and scouting for fires on a horse. He might have written down these song lyrics to pass the time and jog his memory. This would have 1927 or 1928,
My grandfather made no notation of artists and so I pulled up some online versions available at the time that I liked.
"On The Banks of the Sunny San Juan" by Eddie Dean.
"La Adelita" by Mariachi Acquila
I, too, like a good mariachi.
My grandfather has written out the lyrics in Spanish. We didn't know he knew Spanish. My brother found my grandfather's resume for the Indian Service and it lists his knowledge of Spanish (this would have been useful as many rural Native Americans at the time spoke only their tribal languages and often Spanish but not English) and that my grandfather had taught school in a tiny Spanish town on what is now the Bell Ranch and his subjects included Spanish.
I wish we had known about this when he was around.
I wasn't able to find everything in the notebook. I should take another pass at it. Like this Spanish song handwritten in his notebook:
"In The Shadow of the Pines" by The Carter Family
"Los Golondrinas" by Mariachi Estrella de Los Angeles
"Two Little Girls in Blue" by Bill Jorgenson
"Bury Me Not on the Long Prairie" by The Dinning Sisters
"Triguenita Hermosa" by Flaco Jimenez
"Chisholm Trail" by Woody Guthrie
"Despues del Baile" by Los Hermanos Pineda
"Noche de Paz"
I found two versions of "Strawberry Roan" that I liked.
"Strawberry Roan" by Gene Autrey
"Strawberry Roan" by Marty Robbins
The "Strawberry Roan" lyrics from the notebook:
Back then I couldn't find versions of "My Carolina Home." Here is a version by the first country superstar, Vernon Dalhart.
My father was pretty sure my grandparents and great-grandparents didn't have a phonograph or a radio, (Harding County residents unlikely did), but that they likely heard the latest songs from traveling bands at local dances.
My grandmother used to say about my grandfather, "He was a good dancer...for a big guy." My mother seconded this assessment. My father refused to dance with my dance-teacher mother and she often danced with my grandfather. It's probably a miracle I got my Dad to dance at my wedding. It took a lot of fast talking. And he picked the song...not a cowboy song, a song from a Sonny & Cher record. My mother taught us the waltz for it.
My grandfather wrote down the song title on the back of the notebook.
My New Mexico family is full of railroad station agents, high plains preachers and teachers, town founders, homesteaders, cowboys and ranchers. My great-grandfather was the professional rancher. His son, my grandfather, after retiring from the Indian Service did hobby ranching.
Despite my Dad's own grandfather, my great-grandfather, grooming my Dad to take over the ranch, my father left New Mexico to join the Coast Guard where he got into electronics and then computers and other machines (cars). He figuratively (and kinda literally) traded in a horse for a motorcycle.
But nowadays he's looking back to his days on a horse. Growing up my Dad loved Tex Ritter. My grandmother told me he would drive them crazy with his 78-rpm record of "Blood on the Saddle." And I just cannot. I cannot. I just spent ten minutes trying to find a Tex Ritter song I could listen to.
I'm guessing all the Sonny & Cher my Dad was made to listen in my childhood was parental payback for my grandparents having to listen to so much Tex Ritter.
"(I've Got Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle" by Tex Ritter.
As a young man my Dad loved Johnny Cash and he went to see Johnny Cash play pretty early on in Cash's career. He took my mother and it was one of their first dates in Oregon. My mother said she wasn't exactly disappointed in Johnny Cash; she just thought he was going to be a trumpet player. This was in 1957 when Johnny Cash was still playing with The Tennessee Two (Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant) and my Dad has told me times before about loving their early sound, described now often as minimalist.
"Hey Porter" by Johnny Cash
So much better than Tex Ritter to my ears. (I was more of a fan of his charismatic and underappreciated son John Ritter, to be honest).
My Dad recently gave me his Top 10 favorite artists and Tex Ritter and Johnny Cash are still there.
Comments
Post a Comment