Cowboy Waltz: A Song History

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Several different tunes go by "Cowboy Waltz." The one followed here is the D-major waltz connected with Woody Guthrie, who fiddled it on a recording with Bess Lomax Hawes on mandolin.[1] Smithsonian Folkways released that performance in 1999 on Buffalo Skinners: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 4.[1] The New Lost City Ramblers learned the tune from an earlier Folkways release, Woody Guthrie & Friends (FP 10), and put it on String Band Instrumentals (Folkways, 1964), with Mike Seeger fiddling in D.[2][3] The band's notes present it as a typical rural dance waltz, a break from the squares.[2] Bruce Molsky teaches it in an old-time fiddle course on Peghead Nation.[4]

1941 photograph of a smiling young woman with two cowboys at a Saturday night dance in Birney, Montana

Marion Post Wolcott, “Dude girl with two cowboys at a Saturday night dance in Birney, Montana,” photograph, August 1941. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Sources differ on where the melody came from. Peghead Nation credits Guthrie as its composer.[4] The Traditional Tune Archive instead treats Guthrie's waltz as a pared-down form of "Keller's Waltz."[3][5] The same archive reports that Paul Tyler heard echoes of Eddy Arnold's "Cattle Call" in the first strain, and that the tune also reminded him of a "Minnesota Dutchman" waltz recorded as "St. Paul's Waltz." It also reports Paul Gifford's belief that the melody was known among the children of German settlers in Ravenna, Michigan, after the Civil War.[3] These remarks hint at German-American roots, but they are impressions rather than a documented line of descent.

The name has been attached to other waltzes too. The Library of Congress identifies an untitled G-major waltz that Virginia fiddler Henry Reed played at home in Glen Lyn in August 1966 as the tune usually called "Cowboy Waltz." Its notes say Reed learned it from recordings by Henry Ford's Orchestra.[6] The sources consulted here do not say whether Reed's tune and Guthrie's are the same melody. The Traditional Tune Archive also lists a G-major "Cowboy Waltz" from Arkansas fiddler Tilman Pyeatt, a D-major one credited to Casey Jones of Missouri, and an Al Berard recording also titled "Valse des Vachers."[7][8][9] "Cowboy Waltz" is one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[10]

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Sources

  1. Smithsonian Folkways: "Cowboy Waltz" (Woody Guthrie).
  2. Smithsonian Folkways: "String Band Instrumentals" liner notes (New Lost City Ramblers, FA 2492).
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Cowboy Waltz (1)".
  4. Peghead Nation: "Cowboy Waltz, Part 1".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Keller's Waltz".
  6. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "[Cowboy Waltz]" (Henry Reed collection).
  7. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cowboy Waltz".
  8. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Cowboy Waltz (3)".
  9. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Cowboy Waltz (2)".
  10. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".