Authentic old cowboy music

[krtek a houby]

I’m looking for really old cowboy music. What might now fall under the umbrella of folk, I guess, but cowboy focussed. The kind of music that would have been written and sung by the people who travelled across America with the cattle.

I’m interested in listening to the earliest music that we can access.
The kind of stuff Alan Lomax was interested in.
So much has been re-recorded that it’s hard to get at the early stuff.

Also, any good documentaries that anyone can recommend please.

Thank you Urban

Would Jimmie Rodgers fit into that category? He was inspired by train workers and there's definitely blues in the mix, but he's one of the greats, whether cowboy or traveling man...

 

[Humberto]

Another factor was blind lemon. might have been just a meteor strike. Al the early jazz boys where listening to this for sure.

I don't know if some handsomne pretty momma want some dick.

 

[two sheds]

Dunno you come accross as a wally to me,

oh the irony

and a bit of cross-thread beef there from last night

Apologies though story I stop now.

 

[Humberto]

oh the irony

and a bit of cross-thread beef there from last night

Apologies though story I stop now.

Not really sure where you are coming from.

 

[Humberto]

I don't do 'beef'.

 

[Pickman's model]

I don't do 'beef'.

How about pork pies?

 

[Humberto]

How about pork pies?

Touche

 

[Humberto]

How about pork pies?

What's your point?

 

[Elpenor]

How about pork pies?

A fair amount of talking cock (au vin) too

 

[Humberto]

You are all laughing at me why? Rude fuckers.

 

[Humberto]

The song's about his cock, as is a lot early music bawdy. He learnt his trade travelling with medicine shows (snake oil) so there's a history tradition there (songsters) and a lot of the early jazz virtuosos respected him. I'm not sure what the arch people who assume they've 'beef' are on about.

 

[kabbes]

The House of the Rising Sun has an interesting history. It potentially dates from a 17th century English folk tune but it’s more modern incarnation seems to have been broadly in place and sung by American miners at around the turn of the 20th century. Recorded in the early 1930s by an Appalachian folk singer. Not sure about its situation vis a vis cowboys, though.

 

[story]

Love this!

Thanks for posting it, I’ve not seen/ heard it before.

 

[story]

Git Along Little Dogies.
Written around 1893...

This has unlocked a memory!

My Uncle Brock took me to the cattle auction a couple of times.

The wiry bowlegged sales hands who walked across the backs of the beasts in their pens and then drove them through the chutes into the sales ring, the monotone gabbledy chanting of the auctioneer, the cattle and pigs being driven round the sales ring, and the emaciated ponies. The men sat separated alone from each other on the tiers of bleachers all round like an amphitheater with their legs spraddled and their elbows on their knees, hands clasped between them, all of them the same, spitting tobacco juice down to the dirt floor beneath them. And then the cruelty of the cattle prods, then shouting and whistling the bought beasts up into the trucks. The rusted out floor of the truck cab and the road rushing beneath us like river in spate, my uncle shouting at my cousin to get the cattle to stop mounting each other in the back, looking through the little dirty window and seeing the blank desperate stare of the bull trying for one last surge of life, and Stevie clambering out of the window of the moving truck to shout and holler at the bull and his legs still inside beside me. My uncle jumping in his seat and saying unintelligible things to me through his tobacco brown clenched grin. And then when it had been quiet for a while, the auction adrenaline gone and the long road ahead, my uncle singing and whistling this song, looking over at me sat between them on the bench seat of the ancient truck.

 

[story]

someone had to

A club I used to go to…. god which one was it… used to play this as the last track of the night. It wasn’t the Mud Club (that was Frank Sinatra’s My Way)… must have been one of the Rockabilly clubs…. Maybe that one at The Camden Ballroom?

Anyway, it was a matter of pride to get all the words right without stumbling over them.

 

[story]

I dislike the kind of yodelling that comes out of Austria etc. but this is less…. mannered?

 

[story]

Another Wiki bit said they wouldn't drink on the trail itself, and it was probably forbidden (would seem a bad idea). So it was at the stopovers they probably spent their wages, kind of like merchant seamen are sometimes reputed to be.

But I imagine that they must have played music as they camped in the evening? That many days and nights together, they had to have some kind of distraction from the intensity of only being with each other.

 

[story]

Here's an authentic old frontier cowboy



sorry I'm not helping am I

 

[story]

Would Jimmie Rodgers fit into that category? He was inspired by train workers and there's definitely blues in the mix, but he's one of the greats, whether cowboy or traveling man...

I’m not sure that any of these suggestions really fit what I was asking for, but I’m enjoying the thread and it goes to show how porous the boundaries between genres are /were.

 

[krtek a houby]

Arguably, Lomax's version is the more passionate but McClintock's is the older...

 

[Ms Ordinary]

I dislike the kind of yodelling that comes out of Austria etc. but this is less…. mannered?

I don't know what modern Austrian performative yodelling sounds like, but I once watched a documentary about Swiss yodelling (I was the only one in the cinema) and I recall the sounds they used for calling from alp to alp were really deep & primal, something in between whale music and (unsurprisingly) the sounds that come out of a big alphorn.

(Mind you, I fell asleep for a bit, so I can't be absolutely sure I didn't dream it, there was also some dancing round campfires in kind of greek tragedy masks)

Anyway it was definitely nothing like the lovely unrepressed yodelling in your clip there, you have that right!

 

[klang]

I dislike the kind of yodelling that comes out of Austria

Some of it is annoying, some is cheesy, some is weird, and some of it is stunningly beautiful.

 

[Humberto]

But I imagine that they must have played music as they camped in the evening? That many days and nights together, they had to have some kind of distraction from the intensity of only being with each other.

You'd think so. Possibly a ukelele and mouth organ doesn't seem far fetched. Think some of the crews were pretty tight and instrumentalism was highly popular 'at the time' it seems. Probably needed to keep up spirits, missed their girl/wife at home if they had one, comradeship stuck in the arse end of nowhere doing low-status physical work. Amidst a largely unspoilt/untamed vast expanse, beneath the stars, with danger in the darkness.

 

[Humberto]

I’m looking for really old cowboy music. What might now fall under the umbrella of folk, I guess, but cowboy focussed. The kind of music that would have been written and sung by the people who travelled across America with the cattle.

I’m interested in listening to the earliest music that we can access.
The kind of stuff Alan Lomax was interested in.
So much has been re-recorded that it’s hard to get at the early stuff.

Also, any good documentaries that anyone can recommend please.

Thank you Urban

Just thinking about this, nationality would have played a part. The gold rush in the 1840s and '50s would have drew people out, but the people themselves would likely have been immigrants, or sons and daughters of immigrants.
So there were a lot of cultures making their way for an opportunity. Dutch, German. Chinese, Irish, all over with an influx. Plus it (cow handling) was one of the routes for freed black slaves.

My guess is folky and sentimental would have been sung around the fire.