Buffalo Skinners: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"The Buffalo Skinners" tells of a crew hired by a man named Crego to skin buffalo; he cheats and mistreats them all season, and in the end the men kill him.[1] John A. Lomax printed it in the 1910 first edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.[2] In that text the hiring takes place in Jacksboro, Texas, in the spring of 1873,[2] and Tom Isern, writing in his Plains Folk series, observes that the business of outfitting buffalo hunters later moved north to Dodge City and then on to Dakota Territory.[3] In his autobiography Lomax told of meeting an old buffalo hunter in Abilene, Texas, who claimed that he and his companions had both killed Crego and made up the ballad, an origin legend Isern judges dubious.[3]

Color trade card showing a large brown bison walking across green grassland, with the caption American Bison

American Bison, from the Animals of the World series (T180), issued by Abdul Cigarettes, commercial color lithograph, 1881. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A trade card, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Ballad scholars generally trace the song back to the lumber camps, to the woodsmen's complaint "Canaday-I-O" and its regional cousin "Michigan-I-O," though Isern calls its ancestry tangled.[3] The Ballad Index catalogs "The Buffalo Skinners" as Laws B10a and Roud 634 and cross-references it to "Canaday-I-O," which is Laws C17 and Roud 640.[1][4] According to the University of Maine's folklife center, "Canaday-I-O" is usually attributed to Ephraim Braley, a Maine woodsman, and dated to the 1850s; carried westward, it was reworked in the Pennsylvania and Michigan woods and eventually surfaced in Texas as the skinners' song.[5] In 1938 Alan Lomax recorded Lester Wells, an 82-year-old who had learned "Michigan-I-O" in the lumber camps of the 1880s, singing it in Traverse City, Michigan; the Library of Congress describes that recording as stopping just before the bloody ending of the western song.[6]

John Lomax recorded Pete Harris singing "The Buffalo Skinners" with guitar in Richmond, Texas, in May 1934,[7] and Lomax himself was recorded singing it in Houston on 10 April 1939.[8] Woody Guthrie recorded a "Buffalo Skinners" for Moses Asch on 24 March 1945, although the album notes by Guy Logsdon and Jeff Place explain that Guthrie took his words from "Boggy Creek," a cowboy relative printed in the Lomaxes' 1938 edition, dropping one verse and changing a New Mexico line to name the buffalo trail.[9] Pete Seeger's recording of the song is included on Smithsonian Folkways' American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 5.[10]

Find books with Buffalo Skinners for sale →

Sources

  1. Folklorist (Traditional Ballad Index data, Waltz & Engle): "The Buffalo Skinners".
  2. Internet Archive: "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (John A. Lomax, Sturgis & Walton, 1910).
  3. Prairie Public, Plains Folk: "A Man by the Name of Crego" (Tom Isern).
  4. Folklorist (Traditional Ballad Index data, Waltz & Engle): "Canaday-I-O, Michigan-I-O, Colley's Run I-O".
  5. University of Maine, Maine Folklife Center: "Franklin, 'Canaday-I-O'".
  6. Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "Michigan-I-O: Alan Lomax and the 1938 Library of Congress Folk-Song Expedition".
  7. Library of Congress: "The buffalo skinners" (Pete Harris, Richmond, Texas, 1934; catalog card).
  8. Library of Congress: "Buffalo Skinners, The" (John A. Lomax, Houston, 1939).
  9. Smithsonian Folkways: "Woody Guthrie, Buffalo Skinners: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 4" liner notes (Guy Logsdon and Jeff Place).
  10. Smithsonian Folkways: "American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 5" (Pete Seeger).