This was a song written by Canadian rodeo cowboy turned folksinger, the prolific and amazing Ian Tyson, sometime in the 60’s. He recorded it with his wife Sylvia (Ian and Sylvia of the hippie days), but the cover Judi Collins did not long after was a big charting song for years and is the version most people think of when they think of the song Someday Soon. I heard neither but heard the wonderful died-too-young Kate Wolf sing it live and then later Mo Bandy. We love this song. It’s interesting to realize Tyson’s original was about a teenage ranch kid who wants to follow his hero: an only slightly older rodeo cowboy tramping around from rodeo to rodeo, whose parents’ opinion that the older boy is just a kind of wild living riff-raff loser won’t stop him. Then with Judi Collins the song was from the eyes of a teenage girl who wants to run away with a young, wild-living rodeo cowboy. Then the song thereafter was sung from the point of view of the young rodeo cowboy hoping the girl he loves will accompany him in his adventures to the great dismay of her parents, which is the way I learned it and the way I’m singing the song here and can really identify with.

This story-ballad originated right here in New Mexico about an incident that actually took place here in the old pre-fence days before WW1. This song has probably been performed and recorded by more western singers than any I know due both to its sweetness of emotion and from the fact that it was one of the first so-called “cowboy songs” ever actually authored and written down with pencil and paper by a known cowboy while on the trail, Jack Thorpe. Mr. Thorpe actually created the genre of “cowboy music” and became a working cowboy in New Mexico before we were a state with the express intention of gathering up the tunes that all the cow hands were singing. He soon discovered that most of the songs they were singing were only rarely songs of cowboy life but songs popular everywhere cowboys were originally from. Moving from outfit to outfit starting in the 1880’s with a miniature banjo that fit in his mule pack, Jack Thorpe joined Black cowboy outfits, Mexican cowboy outfits, and white cowboy outfits, and in 10 years found only 21 “cowboy” songs in English that directly referred to life on the range. Everything else were the same songs of love, cotton picking, train songs, work songs, civil war songs, and funny songs popular “back home”. At that time most of the songs that dealt directly with a cowboy life with noteworthy horses and cows were sung in Spanish by Mexican-American cowboys. Unfortunately, he didn’t collect any of these, but a lot of these are still around.

Cowboying for an outfit had differing levels of skill; some very specialized, others less so, but everybody had to learn to ride, rope, read cattle moods, etc. At that time especially here in the southwest, driving cattle for an outfit, big or small, was a little like running away with the circus, or running away to a life on the sea: you had to work your way up to learn the skills and subtle particulars of the different aspects of cowboy work, but no one asked about your past and you could start a new life. Somebody who was experienced and knew it all, had his own horses, his own saddle, ropes and equipment was highly prized and paid a wage accordingly. But, like the crews on the old merchant sailing ships on the coasts, most cowboys weren’t paid a set wage but, signed on for shares, whose percentage was set according to a person’s knowledge and ability. This meant if the herd did well in their care and the market held, once the cattle were successfully shipped and sold, the money was divided up according to the previously agreed upon shares. But if the herd failed, or the market was low, the pay at the end of the trail could be quite disappointing. But in the interim while doing the shifts, one got free food and the freedom of a cowboy lifestyle.

Before the fencing-in of the west, big outfits usually had permanent headquarters, where the mama cows and a few year-round hands wintered, but like sailors who signed on for a voyage, most cowboys were hired seasonally for a cattle fattening drive through the sea of grass that had once sustained millions of buffalo and at that time still lots of elk, deer, and antelope. These original cowboys were basically nomadic herders who fattened cattle as they drove them very slowly 800 miles to a railhead where the steers were sold to brokers and shipped to the big cities like Chicago or other cities farther east.

People became cowboys in search of freedom, fleeing the tyranny of the endless debt of company store wage jobs in mines, factories, or plantations, as anonymous grunts in the cities,  or to escape a hopeless social situation. This is why during this era in the west, in the aftermath if the devastation of the American Civil War, cattle driving became a big American industry in the west. But it only lasted in this form for less than 30 years before the open land was all fenced, the grasslands given over to government homesteads and small farmers in debt to the banks, and the era of big corporate cattle companies who owned huge tracts of open land and concessions of public land took over all the west. Some cowboys continued working wage work as seasonal pick-up riders and fence menders for these big outfits. While the original free-wheeling independent cowboy who worked for equal shares with his loyal mates driving cows on the unobstructed open range disappeared, their memory remained a psychological artifact of hope in the soul of poor Americans wrung dry by so much economic hypocrisy, giving birth to a thousand cheap escapist novels, and later a million romantic “western” movies. 

It’s good to remember that this old western style of raising cattle and sheep was already well established in southwest during the Spanish and Mexican era since the 1700’s through the 1800’s continuing on in the area well after the American takeover in the mid 19^th century. Thus, all of the characteristics and way these outfits worked in the American period were none of them an “Anglo” invention. All the gear, methods of working the cattle, and the ethos of the cowboy came from the well-established institution of the Spanish vaquero (English-buckaroo), west of the Mississippi. This is why the cook was called a cocinero, a catch rope was called a lariat (la riata in Spanish), leggings were called chaps from the Spanish chaparreras, and the man in charge of the horse pool was called the wrangler having nothing to do with the English verb wrangle or wrestle but  from the Spanish cattleman’s word caballarango: the person in charge of the remuda (Spanish for the string of broke cow horses that are grazed in the open range). Rodeo is Spanish for the round up. It goes on and on: concho, latigo, quirt (cuarta), cinch (cincho), mustang (mesteno), macarty (mecate), hackamore (jaquima), etc., and so on.

This is also why originally most of the music of the range was sung to Mexican melodies on little Mexican jaranas, or small guitars, easy to carry from cow camp to cow camp. The guitar we all associate with cowboys had not yet reached the popularity it did on the 20^th century with the harmonica and accordion. Fiddlers were the big thing at halls in later times but not in cow camps.

In my version here of Thorpe’s Little Joe the Wrangler, I’m playing a rare instrument I just love: a Spanish vihuela, a kind of flat-back lute made for me by Damian Reolid in Spain. It is a replica of an early renaissance vihuela with 8 tied, real-gut frets, 9 different woods, no metal at all, 6 double courses of 11 real gut strings. I’ve created all my recent rock songs on this marvelous ancestor of the ukulele, cuatro, quinto, Mexican vihuela (and many more), but it weighs nothing and was a favorite instrument with itinerant troubadours in Spain for its portability.

This song was created by a young Tex Owens convalescing from an appendectomy in a Colorado hospital in 1947. It was the dead of winter and snowing outside and he’d given up trying for popularity as a singer/songwriter. Having grown up tending his parents’ cattle on the Oklahoma-Texas border, he felt sorry for all the animals out in the -30 weather and made this song in the hospital bed, imagining as he later said, “breaking ears of dried corn over the wagon wheel for starving mama cows out in the snow”. He then started singing in the hospital with his guitar making up new songs to comfort other patients, especially a group of children recovering from severe frostbite, the only survivors of a winter school outing in the mountains. Realizing from that moment on that what really mattered with his music was not fame and attention, but the joy and well-being it could give, Tex went on to become a strange and interesting country-type musician, who though practically unknown today, went on to became relatively famous then for such songs as the Porcupine Serenade! 

Cattle Call was a big hit later for Eddy Arnold, but the music industry got things confused. A cattle call with a lot of whoops and hollering is a traditional way to summon cows, particularly in the snowy winters to come to a horse pulled wagon or sledge dropping supplementary feed -hay-or corn. Herders also used to call cows with cow horn bugles in the old Europe and east coast America. Today most of the ranchers I know each have a kind of cadence they play on the horns of their hay filled pick-up trucks that does pretty much the same thing, bringing any spread-out cattle within earshot rushing to the feed. But…

The other kind of cattle call is the saddle song, which hales from the old cattle driving days and which for all intents and purposes is a lullaby for cattle. Singing while riding herd has always been a tradition worldwide among cattle and sheep herders, for it tended to keep away predators at night and calmed the herd, keeping them from bolting. On moonless nights this type of singing also let all the other cowboys on the night shift know where each of them were without making a lot of yelling so as not to spook the cattle. Native Americans cowboys and African American cowboys made some of the best and traditionally used cattle calming songs. Sung in a gentler more melodic tenure, these songs often became a kind of cowboy blues with the singer communicating his mutual sufferings and joys to the cows and horses who were his daily companions. That’s the kind of song I’m singing here. This was a real genre of folk music that just got thrown in with all the other acapella sounds and songs people used in their daily existences, because those who “collected” the music of villages, tribes, refugees, and other amazing people, had no reference point in their own lives for such an ancient musical institution, or more than an afternoon of personal experience with the lifestyle of the people from whom they were “collecting” these amazing song forms. Thus, a lot of what the song collector heard was often assumed to be something lesser than it really was.

Written by Dan Seals of Seals and Croft when he left soft rock and went solo into alternative country music. I met Mr. Seals once when I was working in Guatemala City as a studio musician (guitarist) for a Central American record company. The producer for this outfit was also a Bahá’í missionary and Dan Seals was a devout follower of the Bahá’í faith. But I was just working for a meager living recording radio jingles, advertisement sound tracks, and crazy chewing gum ads, and was in the main recording pit doing a samba for an airline ad for which I couldn’t seem to find a chord to end it on. After trying a thousand angles a voice unknown to me came through the headphones from the control room “use a zippy Z dude”. I’d never heard of a zippy Z, so this man, Dan Seals, appeared and showed me. Seals and Croft were on tour and just visiting their Bahá’í buddy.

We all love this self-explanatory song.

This ranchera song was an anthem sung during the Mexican Revolution days for all the female revolutionaries that had joined the troops. I grew up singing it, and along with almost every singer in Mexico, adjusted the lyrics like we always did to express the issues of the day. It is widely sung everywhere, by everybody, but certainly a dance tune that reached the hearts of the cowgirls on the borderlands.

Written down by Santa Fe poets Margeret Larkin and Lynn Rigg, who heard the song being sung by a cowboy in Las Vegas, New Mexico on his way to his next gig, just as described in I Ride an Old Paint. They forgot to tell us the name of the singer, or if he created it, or where he got from, but it was included in Larkin’s song book Songs of the Cowboys. A decade later journalist, funny, old, Super-American Carl Sandburg found it in Larkin’s book and recorded it in 1927 as part of his campaign for the working-class melting pot America, and that’s where it became known to the country.

But this beautiful rolling waltz is from New Mexico, and I’ve been singing it since I was about seven. There are a few old cowboy range terms in the song that may mystify people from other parts like “throwing the hoolihan”, which is one of the many forms of lariat throws available to the well-educated cowboy when roping from the saddle. The art of roping cows and horses from the saddle came directly from Mexico where it has reached an intricate art form– literally– and practiced today by both men and women where it is called El Floreo. American cowboys were and are very skilled with the use of the rope and adopted most of the Floreo moves, but they nicknamed a couple of the more-often-used rudimentary throws with their own lingo, like the “hoolihan”. Depending on how fast, how big or small, what direction you’re moving in relation to what’s running or not, whether it’s a horse or a cow, whether you’re after the heels or the head, you use a different well-practiced throw to accomplish your goal. A hoolihan is a quiet elementary toss of rope that is very trustworthy, whereby a stiff, open loop is held in the right hand over the left side of you and your horse, and whether you’re moving or not, if the animal you are after is running past you forward, parallel on your right, you simply flip the loop from the left to the right and let the animal you are intending to catch, run his head right into the loop ‘til it tightens of its own inertia, and you dally (another Mexican word) around your horn before he hits the end of the line. A hoolihan has no fancy winging of the rope around nor is it a legitimate rope throw; just a kind of backhand toss and doesn’t tire a person out so much.

“I lead an old Dan”: a Dan is a mule. Here he is talking about a pack mule loaded up with this itinerant cowboy’s essential belongings. In other words, he is riding his roping horse “Old Paint”, while pulling along his old pack mule while moving to a new job in a new location. A lot of cowboys in that era also roped off riding mules.

“Doogies” is a word for young cows, not mama cows, not steers, not bulls, but calves, little or half-grown, being driven in large herds to fatten for market, the core reason for a cowboy’s existence.

“Fiery and Snuffy” -two nicknames for any older troublemaker calves who are always ready to bolt and cause a stampede, which everyone dreads ‘cause they are really hard to stop and they usually end with a number of cows, either lost or trampled to death.

I first heard this song on a rare old LP played on a twelve-string guitar (like I am playing here) by the great country-blues guitarist Etta Baker. There were no lyrics just Etta’s amazing finger picking which at the age of 11, I fell in love with. Nobody played this way where we lived, so I had no idea how to accomplish such a sound, but without being able to see her do it, I just kept on trying till I came up with something resembling Etta Baker’s version.

Etta Baker didn’t reach as much into the popular folk genre like her contemporary Elizabeth Cotton, both African American\Native American woman, piedmont Carolina folk musicians, because she didn’t perform much. But everyone who did hear her rolling fingerpicking was musically charged by the experience, I know I certainly was.

I didn’t even know till much later that the song had lyrics at all. It was then that I found out a little about the man Railroad Bill, and after hearing a million different folk singer’s versions, none of which had the musical zip and rumble of Etta Baker’s wordless version (which was recorded by a person who didn’t pay her or give her hardly any credit on the album, just one of many backlot musicians jumbled onto a disc), I discovered that Railroad Bill was originally sung a lot, and mostly by working-class African American folksingers including those Black cowboys here in the west!

Railroad Bill was a famous train robber during the 1880’s-96. There were two men during the late 19^th century who were simultaneously running personal vendettas against the same big rail line for its brutal mistreatment of the poor: one in Alabama and one on the other end of the same line in Georgia. The fellow in Alabama called himself Morris Slater and was a kind of Robinhood. The train robber in Georgia was a rough, more typical train robber called Railroad Bill. When the Georgia Railroad Bill was taken down by the authorities, Morris Slater assumed the name for himself, like a title. This is the hero about whom this song Railroad Bill here is talking. Both men were Black southerners and everybody thought they were one person and accounts for the wildly opposed lyrics sang to the tune.

In the southern USA, after the Civil War, survival in the rough and tumble atmosphere of racism, enforced poverty, and classist corruption was touch and go for poor Black, White, and Native people all around. As a young man, Morris Slater had joined a circus for a while, and was a very athletic performer who could swing and climb on ropes, jump from wagon to wagon, horse to horse, and lift and haul huge loads. Everybody loved him, except, the white train officials later on. Later, Mr. Slater was working in the turpentine camps out in the pine bush, a tough and useful laborer they said. Accustomed to simply jumping onto one of the platforms of a slow passing train and ride standing outside a few miles to his work camp as many others did, he was caught off guard one time by a newly appointed railroad bouncer put in place to boot off any ‘freeloaders’. This guard tried to throw Slater off the moving train but when he failed in his purpose, due to Morris Slaters superior strength, decided he would take up his carbine and shoot this unyielding Black man, but Slater using his circus training leapt from the moving train and shot the train official with his own turpentine camp rifle and disappeared into the pines. From then on he was considered an outlaw and for the rest of his life robbed trains for a living, robbing only trains of that one particular rail company out of revenge. No one could catch him and his fame rose higher and higher. The public followed his weekly escapades like a sports hero in the newspapers, keeping score as he “robbed and rode” and always giving “the Man” the slip. His efforts all but brought that rail line’s business to its knees cause no well-to-do people would ride the line for fear of a gun battle, or having their luggage robbed. This no doubt was Railroad Bill’s intention for the intolerance shown people just trying to survive. There are so many stories and news reports of the wildly athletic motions in the run-ins with sheriffs and detectives that “Morris Slater turned Railroad Bill” had during the decade of his robberies, that he became the favorite of every oppressed person in the area, especially African Americans. For one, he had a marvelous way of robbing that never did any violence to any person while he robbed, and supplied many families with food, clothing, and money he obtained from selling some of what he took, for he robbed only the baggage cars of passenger trains. Railroad Bill would tether a horse hidden in the forest at an appointed spot, and leave another horse tethered where he jumped unseen onto the train. Once in the baggage compartment he’d quietly assess the richness of the luggage, where alone and unseen he’d quickly toss the promising ones off the train as it moved up the line. When he’d arrived at the place where he’d left his one horse, he’d exit the train unseen, rolling like an acrobat, mount his steed, and begin gathering up the valuable stuff he’d tossed from the train, packing it on his horse until he got to the other horse and disappear with both horses into the dark wood. He developed a friendship with an intricate network of small businesses to help him distribute what was useful to people who needed it. These friendly stores would trade him for food or supplies or buy from him what they could resell without getting caught.

Many traps were set for him, but he always shot and jumped and spun out of harms way only one time being wounded, while the price on his head rose from $250 to close to $1500 for his apprehension, dead or alive. This brought bounty hunters from all over the country, and some say even Europe and Australia. Though the average income of an adult white male worker was less than 50 cents a day, Bill was so well loved no one turned him in for years, until a store owner where Bill used to fence some of his plunder for the poor, set him up for capture hoping for part of the reward money. In 1896, $1500 was equivalent to today’s money of $52,000. After more than a dozen shoot-outs with bounty hunters, and some 20 close calls with detectives, and more with sheriffs, one in which Bill was cornered and forced to highjack a loaded train, driving the engine himself while carrying out an active gunbattle with agents on the train, he drove out of the city and into the countryside where he somersaulted out of the cab into the night to disappear into the wild to ride and rob again. For years he sparked hope and the regeneration of the old spiritual understandings in many African and Native communities throughout the deep south who knew that Bill could not be stopped by his enemies only by those he’d helped if they turned on him. They all knew that he had the capacity to turn into different animals to escape capture and from being recognized: all normal west African\Muscogee, Choctaw, Miccosukee warrior methods.

And that’s exactly what happened, Railroad Bill was betrayed by a man he trusted in the aforementioned country store, where he was ambushed by the authorities and shot dead.

After the white authorities had his body embalmed and taken to the big city for verification to receive the reward, the body was further embalmed to petrify it and sold to a carnival circus as a freakshow exhibit, until a large cry of outrage came from southern African-American citizens who through a church in Pensacola, Florida were able to raise the necessary funds from parishioners to buy Railroad Bill’s body and give him a hero’s burial and funeral. For they knew Bill only robbed the well-off and gave to those in need and never hurt anybody that wasn’t shooting at him. “Railroad Bill is always on my mind and always will.” Cowboys love train songs, and songs about the Robin Hoods of the world. I do anyway.

These two songs I picked up from Joe Montana, a Dine\Navajo rodeo cowboy who sang them with his band The Valley Boys, a really popular western dance band in and around the Navajo reservation when I was a teenager. They had that beat all the Natives from around there loved at that time. I was playing in a fairly popular Pueblo Native R&B, rock group then, but we often shared gigs with the Valley Boys. We always kind of figured these songs were Navajo cowboy songs!

We sang this beautiful old Irish song in my parents’ house in all ways, considering it to be a song come to us from my grandmother Winifred Regan, my Father’s Mother, who was herself from Ireland, county Kerry, they say.

Like all folk songs there are as many permutations of “When I Was Single” as there are people who’ve sung it and differing still from one day to the next. There have been some really plebian boring ones, some cruel raucous ones, some clever charming ones, but this one here is our people’s version sung from Grandma’s point of view (if you knew my grandfather!). This is an example of what people keep alive in their hearts through music and clothing and food, though they drift far and wide of their beloved origins. The Americas are all about that drifting, Natives and immigrant alike.

Night Riders Lament must be the perfect cowboy song of all time, and the undisputed anthem for the land of the American west and the exiles whose love it, for that land and lifestyle caused them to take beauty and liberty over the urban sprawl and walls of social restriction, anxiety, and money security. This song is also a very good song to milk goats to, we sang it with the kids to bring down the milk on those snowy days. It was written by an Arizona cowboy named Micheal Burton, and recorded by everybody, but it is still best with one person singing and playing their guitar at their fire. It’s absolutely operettic, with four different people expressing themselves, and a chorus and an inner chorus to the chorus, and a story within a story sung by one person. I love belting out this song. God Bless Micheal Burton for writing it.