Top 25 Reasons to Be a Cowboy | #11: The Music
In Lonesome Dove, as Gus and Call are riding down the street after a dustup in a local saloon in San Antonio, Gus says, “Call, I guess they forgot us. The reason is, we didn’t die. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done Custer, they’d write songs about us for a hundred years.”
Though not precisely, Gus did prove prophetic. Folks have been singing songs about cowboys for 150 years. While the first artists who wrote and sang cowboy songs are largely lost to time, perhaps the best place to start is with a true singing cowboy named Jack Thorp. He wrote “Little Joe the Wrangler” in 1908 but also compiled many traditional tunes being played on the plains like “Sam Bass” and “Get Along Little Doggies.”
Within a decade or two, groups like the Sons of the Pioneers and individuals such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were making these cowboy tunes famous. All the early Western movies included a singing cowboy. Even John Wayne played “Singing Sandy Saunders” in his early roles.
The cowboy has always held a place in popular music culture—even if the cowboy himself isn’t that popular. In our generation, groups like The Eagles (“Desperado”), Steve Miller Band (“Space Cowboy”), Aerosmith (“Back in the Saddle”), Thin Lizzy (“Cowboy Song”), Bon Jove (“Wanted Dead or Alive”), Kid Rock (“Cowboy”), and even—gulp—Lis Nas X (“Old Town Road”) have all used the cowboy for inspiration.
Although those types of songs might not represent cowboy culture accurately, it is flattering to work in a profession that folks from Boston to L.A. want to write songs about.
Of course, country music and the Nashville scene obviously use the cowboy as a theme. From Marty Robbins to Hank Williams Sr. and Jr.; Waylon and Willie to Johnny Cash; Glen Campbell and Charlie Daniels down through Garth Brooks, Reba, Tim McGraw, Toby Keith, The Chicks, and Brooks and Dunn, they’ve all made hits crooning about cowboys.
Don Edwards, a more traditional cowboy artist who’s been involved with the Working Ranch Cowboys Association throughout the years, however, might have said it best when he told American Cowboy magazine, “Nobody romanticized the cowboy more than the cowboy did.”
That’s why the songs of Edwards himself and others such as Ian Tyson, Red Steagall, Michael Martin Murphey, Chris LeDoux, and yes, even George Strait, ring truer to the working cowboy than any of the other ones.
So while old Gus was sure right when predicted they’d be writing songs about the West and the cowboy for 100 years, isn’t it cool there are still cowboys living lives worth singing about?
photo: ImagineGolf – adobe.istock.com