I'd Like To Be In Texas: A Song History
"I'd Like to Be in Texas," also known as "Roundup in the Spring," is an American cowboy song.[1] It centers on an old former cowhand who overhears a group of cowboys telling stories in a hotel and ends by wishing himself back in Texas for the spring roundup.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index records that Carl Copeland and Jack C. Williams claimed the song, and it notes that Copeland's words were copyrighted in 1916.[1] A 1927 sheet-music edition credited to Copeland and Williams was issued from Fort Worth by Lon Fishback, described in the library's record as "the singing cowboy."[2]
Detroit Publishing Co., Rounding up a herd on a Texas Ranch, photochrom, 1912. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
Accounts of the song's origin differ, and the folklorist J. Frank Dobie traced it through other hands in Texas and Southwestern Lore, the Texas Folklore Society's 1927 volume.[1][3] Dobie first noticed two of its lines in an unpublished play by the cowboy author Andy Adams.[3] Adams answered Dobie's request with two stanzas and a chorus that he had known for some fifteen years; he named W. E. Hawks, an old ranchman living in Burlington, Vermont, as his source, but claimed most of the second stanza as his own.[3] Months afterward, while attending a Texas and Southwestern Cattlemen's Association meeting in Fort Worth, Dobie found Fishback performing the song in a hotel lobby and selling it with the music, his outfit including "a well-creased pair of grey leggins that had never seen sweat or saddle."[3] Dobie's printed version joins Fishback's stanzas, chorus and tune to Adams's added stanza, and he reported that W. W. Burton recalled hearing the song forty or fifty years earlier at a celebration in Colorado City, Texas.[3]
The singer Vernon Dalhart recorded the song for several labels in the autumn of 1926, with Jack Williams credited as composer.[4] His Columbia recording, made in New York on November 1, 1926, credits Copeland as lyricist and was issued as Columbia 15131-D.[5] Leon Chappelear recorded it in 1932, Asa Martin and James Roberts recorded it in 1933 as "The Roundup in the Spring," and Bradley Kincaid also made a recording for Decca.[1] For dulcimer players, Stephen Seifert includes it in Cowboy Songs, a dulcimer book of 37 western songs in his own arrangements.[6]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Roundup in the Spring".
- University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Special Collections: "I'd Like to be in Texas" sheet music cover page.
- UNT Digital Library: J. Frank Dobie, ed., "Texas and Southwestern Lore" (Texas Folklore Society, 1927), page 161.
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Jack Williams".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix W142895. I'd like to be in Texas when they round up in the spring / Vernon Dalhart".
- Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
- Image: Detroit Publishing Co., Rounding up a herd on a Texas Ranch, photochrom, 1912. Library of Congress.