I'm Going To Leave Old Texas: A Song History

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"I'm Going To Leave Old Texas" is an anonymous cowboy lament, catalogued by the Traditional Ballad Index under the title "Going to Leave Old Texas," with "Old Texas," "Texas Song," and "The Cowman's Lament" as alternate names and Roud number 12711.[1] In it a cowhand bids farewell to a Texas that no longer wants his kind of cattle, heads for the open range, and thinks ahead to his own death; the index notes that it is often, though not always, sung to the melody of "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," gives 1946 as its earliest date, and lists camp and Girl Scout songbooks among its printed sources.[1] Kenneth S. Goldstein, annotating Harry Jackson's Folkways album The Cowboy: His Songs, Ballads & Brag Talk, remarked that it had rarely been recorded from traditional singers and tied its mood to the fencing of the Texas range, which began in the 1880s; on that basis he estimated that it was probably composed around the turn of the century.[2]

Wood engraving of a cowboy swinging a lariat at a calf on the Texas range

Frenzeny & Tavernier, The Texas cattle trade. Cutting out, wood engraving, 1874. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Bob Gibson recorded his own adaptation on I Come For To Sing in 1957, according to the Gibson family's catalog of his work.[3] In 1961 the Tex-i-an Boys, a group that included John Lomax Jr., closed their Folkways album Songs of Texas with it, and their notes read it as the cowboy's farewell to a free life ended by barbed wire and farming.[4] Jim Bob Tinsley placed it in his 1981 book of forty-eight traditional cowboy songs, He Was Singin' This Song,[5] and Peter Rowan and Don Edwards recorded it for High Lonesome Cowboy (Western Jubilee, 2002).[6]

Stephen Seifert includes it in Cowboy Songs, a dulcimer book of thirty-seven western songs in DAD tuning, with an MP3 recording of each song.[7]

Our book that contains the song "I'm Going To Leave Old Texas"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Going to Leave Old Texas (Old Texas, Texas Song, The Cowman's Lament)".
  2. Smithsonian Folkways: "Harry Jackson, The Cowboy: His Songs, Ballads & Brag Talk (FH 5723), liner notes".
  3. Bob Gibson Folk Legacy: "I'm Gonna Leave Old Texas".
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: "The Tex-i-an Boys, Songs of Texas".
  5. East Carolina University Libraries: "He Was Singin' This Song" (Jim Bob Tinsley, 1981).
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: "Peter Rowan and Don Edwards, High Lonesome Cowboy".
  7. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  8. Image: Frenzeny & Tavernier, The Texas cattle trade. Cutting out, wood engraving, 1874. Library of Congress.

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