Brown-Eyed Lee: A Song History

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"Brown-Eyed Lee" is a lament of failed courtship: the singer's sweetheart has parents who oppose the match, he swears he will have her all the same, and she turns out to be false, so that he regrets ever meeting her even as he finds he still thinks of her.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index reports a tradition that the rejected lover composed the song himself, and its annotator judges that claim more believable than usual, since the singer seems torn between love and hatred.[1] The Index, which gives it Roud number 4042, cites a single text and tune, from Margaret Larkin's songbook Singing Cowboy, and notes that G. Malcolm Laws listed it as dB35 in Appendix II of his catalog.[1] The Folk Music Index also lists the song in Laws's Native American Balladry (1964) and in the 1968 anthology Songs of the American West.[2]

Watercolor of a bearded man in a broad-brimmed hat, fringed jacket and neckerchief, seated and playing a banjo

Thomas Eakins, Cowboy Singing, watercolor and graphite on off-white wove paper, ca. 1892. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The song is not among those in the 1910 first edition of John A. Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.[3] The Lomax papers' permissions file for the book's 1938 revised edition, however, names "Brown-Eyed Lee" with music from the Amsco Music folio Sing 'Em Cowboy, Sing 'Em, and in a letter dated October 7, 1937, Amsco granted permission to use the song's words and music, asking that the book credit the firm.[4]

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Sources

  1. Folklorist (Traditional Ballad Index data, Waltz & Engle): "Brown-Eyed Lee".
  2. The Folk Music Index (ibiblio): "Bril to Bry".
  3. Internet Archive: "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (John A. Lomax, Sturgis & Walton, 1910).
  4. Library of Congress: "Writings, books, 'Cowboy Songs,' 1938 revised edition, (1/5), John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax papers".