A song by or about cowboys, or both, is referred to as a cowboy song. The cowboy song is the third most popular subgroup of folk songs from the United States, after the spiritual and Native American songs.
Two types of cowboy songs have been identified. The first is an oral tradition song that is made up and passed down by word of mouth. The second type of cowboy song is an adaptation of found words to a well-known tune, which results in the creation of a new song.
Nathan Howard Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboy, published in 1908, is credited with being the first collection of cowboy songs, and John Avery Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, published in 1910, is credited with collecting many of the genre’s best-known songs for the first time.
These seven cowboy songs are among the most popular. The song “The Old Chisholm Trail” is an anecdotal cowboy song, with each stanza detailing the ups and downs of a cowboy’s life. There are no ups in “Git Along Little Dogies,” only downs. It’s a series of rants about life on the road.
The story of a young cowboy who knows he’s “done wrong,” framed by the comments of the cowboy narrator of the story who finds him mortally wounded and sees to his burial, is known as “The Cowboy’s Lament.” The film “Home on the Range” extols the beauty of the American West. The song “I’m A-Leavin’ Cheyenne,” also known as “Old Paint,” is about a cowboy who is leaving Cheyenne for Montana.
Biographies of outlaws are some examples of cowboy songs that tell a story. One of these films is “Billy the Kid,” which depicts Billy the Kid’s downfall at the hands of Sheriff Pat Garrett. The film “Jesse James” is about the last days of one of the famous James brothers, who was immortalized in the 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.