krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
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...
Authentic old cowboy music
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Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
How about pork pies?
Humberto
Relax
Touche
Humberto
Relax
What's your point?
Elpenor
Dancing as fast as I can
A fair amount of talking cock (au vin) too
Humberto
Relax
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I dislike the kind of yodelling that comes out of Austria etc. but this is less…. mannered?
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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.
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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
Merry Xmas!
Arguably, Lomax's version is the more passionate but McClintock's is the older...
Ms Ordinary
randompointlesschemistry
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
klang
Some of it is annoying, some is cheesy, some is weird, and some of it is stunningly beautiful.
Humberto
Relax
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.
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Humberto
Relax
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.
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