Jack Thorp's Songs of the Cowboys

by Jack Thorp

NEW Combo BLUWAVS CD and FLAC FILE

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

Reviews

[Bryan King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone doing serious research on songs of cowboys will find a lot of well documented information here. Very interesting but not for casual reading.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nathan Howard "Jack" Thorp (1867-1940) was the pioneer collector of cowboy songs, publishing the first edition of this book in 1908 and then expanding it in 1921 to its present length of 101 songs and poems, a quarter of them authored by Thorp himself. Thorp was born and educated in the East but cowboyed as a young man in Nebraska and the Southwest, eventually settling in New Mexico, where he owned his own ranch. From an early age he began transcribing the songs he heard sung by cowboys. Although cowboy poetry thrives today, these early examples of this oral tradition would have surely disappeared without the efforts of Thorp and a handful of other collectors.

The songs capture the spirit, humor, and language of working cowboys, although the full scope of language is probably not well represented since many of their songs were too ribald and obscene for publication in 1921. The sentiments range from youthful boasting and celebration of cowboy life to complaints about the hard work to nostalgic reminiscences about old trail pals to mournful laments about loneliness, misfortune, and death ("oh, bury me not on the lone prairie"). Thorp's own contribution to the tradition, "Little Joe, the Wrangler," became popular and was widely recorded. It tells of a brave young wrangler killed in a cattle stampede.

Readers who want to know about "real" cowboys will enjoy this book. It opens a window into the minds and hearts of this fraternity of young horsemen, which flourished for a few short decades in a world that was already being mythologized before it passed into history.