My Love Is A Rider: A Song History
"My Love Is a Rider," also known as "The Bucking Broncho" or "Bucking Bronco," is a cowboy song sung from a woman's point of view: her sweetheart breaks wild horses and has pledged to quit for her sake, yet she ends by telling other women that such pledges rarely hold.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index catalogs it as Laws B15, notes a claim that James Hatch and Billie Davis wrote it in 1882, and gives its earliest date as 1904, in "The Rawhide" in McClure's Magazine.[1] N. Howard Thorp included it in the 1908 edition of Songs of the Cowboys, and John A. Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910) carries a short text headed "The Cowgirl" that opens with the same rider-and-broncos line.[1][2]
Frederic Remington, Coming Through the Rye, bronze, 1902, cast before 1939. Remington's galloping cowboys, shown for the horseback rider of the song; it has no connection to the song.
When Thorp enlarged his book in 1921, he headed the song with a note crediting it to Belle Starr of Indian Territory, dating it to about 1878, saying he had cleaned up the words, and claiming he had known her well.[3] The Ballad Index regards the Starr authorship as unsupported and observes that Starr herself became a figure of legend: Thorp's 1908 edition gave her no credit, Vance Randolph pointed out that there is no evidence she wrote poetry, and Guy Logsdon doubted that Thorp ever met her, a doubt the Index finds reasonable since she died in 1889 and he made the claim only in the 1920s.[1] One of the Index's notes also suggests that Thorp's admitted editing may have tidied up a once bawdier song, while granting that its earlier history is hard to trace.[1]
Powder River Jack Lee, with Kitty Lee on guitar, recorded it as "My Love Is a Cowboy" in Hollywood on 3 November 1930, a side issued on Bluebird and other labels.[4] The Girls of the Golden West, the duo of Mildred and Dorothy Good, recorded "Bucking Broncho (My Love Is a Rider)" on 31 October 1934.[5][1] The Library of Congress's American Folklife Center holds catalog cards for performances by Herbert Halpert, recorded in New York in 1939, and by Tom Glazer with guitar in 1947.[6][7] Stephen Seifert sets it in DAD tuning in Cowboy Songs, a book of 37 western songs that he publishes himself, sold as a download with a separate PDF and an MP3 for every song.[8]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Bucking Broncho (The Broncho Buster) [Laws B15]".
- Internet Archive: "John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (Sturgis & Walton, 1910)".
- Internet Archive: "N. Howard Thorp, Songs of the Cowboys (Houghton Mifflin, 1921)".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix PBVE-61051. My love is a cowboy / Powder River Jack Lee".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Bluebird B-5752".
- Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "My love is a rider (Bucking broncho)" (Herbert Halpert, 1939).
- Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "My love is a rider" (Tom Glazer, 1947).
- Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
- Image: Frederic Remington, Coming Through the Rye, bronze, 1902, cast before 1939. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.