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INTRODUCTION |
xix |
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Ocean," and Jack Thorp's "Little Joe, the Wrangler " was composed to the tune of " The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane."
Many of the cowboy songs, and almost all of the earlier ones, belong to the first type; they exist independent of any printed origin and have come down to us through oral tradition. They are anonymous because their authors have been forgotten, but this does not mean that they were not in the first place of individual authorship; although songs of such loose and catchy structure as "The Old Chis-holm Trail," "01dPaint,"or "TheDeerHunf'lend themselves easily to composite touches. Nor are all of the earlier songs without antecedents. "The Dying Cowboy" was modeled upon a sea-chantey and "The Cowboy's Lament "has been traced to a popular Irish military song of the eighteenth century — the cowboy who had the old song in his memory may well have been of that race. Indeed, the accent of many of the songs has a distinctly Celtic echo:
There ivas a rich old rancher who lived in the country by; He had a lovely daughter, on whom I cast my eye.
But such adaptation and borrowing, far from proving the cowboy songs merely "derelicts," as Professor Gerrould called them in a recent number of the New York Evening Post, is a very usual process, not only with folk-poets, but with other poets as well. Burns modeled many of his poems on well-known songs and airs of the countryside, and they are not therefore merely "derelicts"; nor is Mr. Yeats's "When I am Old and Gray and Full of |
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