Little Joe, The Wrangler: A Song History

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"Little Joe, the Wrangler" is a cowboy ballad by N. Howard "Jack" Thorp, a New York-born Easterner who moved west and worked cattle in New Mexico.[1] In a headnote to the 1921 edition of his Songs of the Cowboys, Thorp wrote that he made it up in 1898 while trailing a herd from Chimney Lake, New Mexico, to Higgins, Texas, and he named the Sacramento Mountains and Crow Flat hands who rode with him.[2] Later retellings add that he jotted the verses on a paper bag beside the campfire.[3][1] The song tells of a runaway boy taken in by a trail crew who dies turning a stampede during a storm; the Traditional Ballad Index catalogs it as Laws B5 and compares its tune with "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane."[4] The Index also notes a claim, published in Sing Out! in 1996, that D. J. O'Malley wrote it, while judging the evidence for Thorp strong.[4]

Bronze sculpture of a cowboy on the ground beneath a bucking, kicking horse

Frederic Remington, The Wicked Pony, bronze, modeled 1898. A cowboy thrown by a bucking horse, modeled the same year Thorp said he made up the song; it has no connection to the song.

Thorp first printed the song in the slim 1908 edition of Songs of the Cowboys, run off in 2,000 copies at the newspaper print shop in Estancia, New Mexico.[2][3][1] Alice Corbin Henderson's introduction to the 1921 edition points out that John A. Lomax afterward took it into his own collection of cowboy songs.[2] The earliest recordings in the sources consulted here date from 1928, when Marc Williams recorded it for Brunswick in March and Jules Verne Allen for Victor in April, and several more singers recorded it in the early 1930s.[4][5] Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Marty Robbins, Chris LeDoux, Red Steagall and Don Edwards are among its later interpreters, and members of the Western Writers of America have placed it on their list of the top 100 western songs.[3][6][1] The Missouri folk song collector Max Hunter taped his own rendition in Springfield in 1969.[7] Stephen Seifert arranges it in DAD tuning in Cowboy Songs, his self-published 78-page dulcimer collection of 37 western songs, each of which comes with an MP3 recording.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Little Joe, The Wrangler"

Sources

  1. New Mexico Magazine: "Jack Thorp".
  2. Internet Archive: "N. Howard Thorp, Songs of the Cowboys (Houghton Mifflin, 1921)".
  3. Santa Fe New Mexican: "In 1908, the first cowboy song book was printed by New Mexico legend Jack Thorp".
  4. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Little Joe the Wrangler [Laws B5]".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "N. Howard Thorp".
  6. Western Horseman: "Little Joe, the Wrangler".
  7. Missouri State University, Max Hunter Folk Song Collection: "Little Joe, The Wrangler".
  8. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  9. Image: Frederic Remington, The Wicked Pony, bronze, modeled 1898. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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