Some Cowboy Songs and Ballads

It is now four or five years since my attention was called to the collection of native American ballads from the Southwest, already begun by Professor Lomax. At that time, he seemed hardly to appreciate their full value and importance. To my colleague, Professor G.L. Kittredge, probably the most eminent authority on folk-song in America, this value and importance appeared as indubitable as it appeared to me. We heartily joined in encouraging the work, as a real contribution both to literature and to learning. The present volume is the first published result of these efforts. The value and importance of the work seems to me double. One phase of it is perhaps too highly special ever to be popular. Whoever has begun the inexhaustibly fascinating study of popular song and literature—of the nameless poetry which vigorously lives through the centuries—must be perplexed by the necessarily conjectural opinions concerning its origin and development held by various and disputing scholars. When songs were made in times and terms which for centuries have been not living facts but facts of remote history or tradition, it is impossible to be sure quite how they begun, and by quite what means they sifted through the centuries into the forms at last securely theirs, in the final rigidity of print. In this collection of American ballads, almost if not quite uniquely, it is possible to trace the precise manner in which songs and cycles of song—obviously analogous to those surviving from older and antique times—have come into being. The facts which are still available concerning the ballads of our own Southwest are such as should go far to prove, or to disprove, many of the theories advanced concerning the laws of literature as evinced in the ballads of the old world... THE DYING COWBOY "O bury me not on the lone prairie," These words came low and mournfully From the pallid lips of a youth who lay On his dying bed at the close of day. He had wailed in pain till o'er his brow Death's shadows fast were gathering now; He thought of his home and his loved ones nigh As the cowboys gathered to see him die. "O bury me not on the lone prairie Where the wild cayotes will howl o'er me, In a narrow grave just six by three, O bury me not on the lone prairie. "In fancy I listen to the well known words Of the free, wild winds and the song of the birds; I think of home and the cottage in the bower And the scenes I loved in my childhood's hour. "It matters not, I've oft been told, Where the body lies when the heart grows cold; Yet grant, Oh grant this wish to me, O bury me not on the lone prairie.