A Cowboy S Song

This play is for all the lady cowboys of heart and mind who ride outside the city limits of convention. Mary, always late and always married, meets a lady cowboy outside the city limits of Pittsburgh who teaches her how to ride a horse. Mary's husband, Crick, buys a painting with the last of their savings. Mary and Crick have a baby, but they can't decide on the baby's name, or the baby's gender. A story of one woman's education and her search to find true love outside the box.

This was the first cowboy song book published in America, and Thorpís lyrics were the beginning of the popularization of the American cowboy. This book lists 24 songs that can be learned and sung today.

(Creative Concepts Publishing). This info-packed, 372-page collection features 200 American cowboy songs with complete lyrics, lead lines and guitar chords, plus an extensive introduction, notes on the songs, illustrations by J.K. Ralston throughout, a lexicon of cowboy terms, a general index and an index of titles and first lines, and more. Songs include: Billy the Kid * Blood on the Saddle * Buffalo Gals * Clementine * Dakota Land * The Girl I Left Behind Me * Going West * Jesse James * Johnny Cake * Old Paint * Punchin' Dough * Red River Valley * Red Wing * Shenandoah * Steamboat Bill * The Streets of Laredo * The Texas Cowboy * and many more.

"One of the finest works to come out in recent years on cowboy songs, in addition to being the first good collection of the cowboy's bawdy material. . . . A must for anyone who is a student of cowboy music--or anyone who just likes the sound of dirty subject matter rhyming." -- Hal Cannon, Journal of Country Music "A brave and honest step toward increasing our understanding of what cowboys really sing." -- Bob Bovee, Old Time Herald "A thorough piece of scholarship and collectanea and a valuable, welcome addition to cowboy song literature." -- Keith Cunningham, Mid-America Folklore "Logsdon has written the book with a scholar's attention to detail. But what shows through the scholarship is the collector's enthusiasm for the material. . . . A superb job in a difficult area." -- Angus Kress Gillespie, Journal of American History "A major contribution to the folklore and popular culture, history, and social psychology of American cowboy culture." -- Kenneth S. Goldstein, former president, American Folklore Society

Many associate early western music with the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but America’s first western music craze predates these “singing cowboys” by decades. Written by Tin Pan Alley songsters in the era before radio, the first popular cowboy and Indian songs circulated as piano sheet music and as cylinder and disc recordings played on wind-up talking machines. The colorful fantasies of western life depicted in these songs capitalized on popular fascination with the West stoked by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, and Edwin S. Porter’s film The Great Train Robbery. The talking machine music industry, centered in New York City, used state-of-the-art recording and printing technology to produce and advertise songs about the American West. Talking Machine West brings together for the first time the variety of cowboy, cowgirl, and Indian music recorded and sold for mass consumption between 1902 and 1918. In the book’s introductory chapters, Michael A. Amundson explains how this music reflected the nostalgic passing of the Indian and the frontier while incorporating modern ragtime music and the racial attitudes of Jim Crow America. Hardly Old West ditties, the songs gave voice to changing ideas about Indians and assimilation, cowboys, the frontier, the rise of the New Woman, and ethnic and racial equality. In the book’s second part, a chronological catalogue of fifty-four western recordings provides the full lyrics and history of each song and reproduces in full color the cover art of extant period sheet music. Each entry also describes the song’s composer(s), lyricist(s), and sheet music illustrator and directs readers to online digitized recordings of each song. Gorgeously illustrated throughout, this book is as entertaining as it is informative, offering the first comprehensive account of popular western recorded music in its earliest form.