Doney Gal: A Song History
"Doney Gal" is a cowboy song about the labor a rider and his horse share in herding cattle, in fair weather or foul.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index gives its earliest date as 1938, citing the revised edition of the Lomaxes' Cowboy Songs, and notes that Louise Williams Henson claimed authorship.[1] Both of the Index's editors gloss "doney" as a word for a woman but trace it differently: one to the Italian donna, the other to Spanish, suggesting that American cowboys took it from Mexicans.[1]
Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, bronze, model 1895, revised 1909, cast by 1910. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its cowboy and horse; it has no connection to the song.
John Lomax collected the song from Henson in San Antonio, Texas, and he and Alan Lomax published it in Our Singing Country (1941).[2][3] The book's headnote ties its version to a 1937 disc in the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song and says the text was rearranged.[3] In a note printed with the song, Henson recalls an uncle who rode away from her family's Oklahoma ranch toward the roundup in pouring rain, singing it; he called his horse Doney Gal, his sweetheart, and none of the family saw him again.[2][3] Mountain dulcimer players will find it in Stephen Seifert's Cowboy Songs, a collection set in chord-melody style in DAD tuning.[4]
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