Night Herding Song: A Song History

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"Night Herding Song" is a weary rider's appeal to a herd that will not stay quiet for him.[1] John A. Lomax printed it in the first edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, published in November 1910, under the heading "By Harry Stephens."[2] More than thirty years later, in 1942, Lomax recorded Stephens singing it in Dallas, and the Library of Congress catalogs Stephens as both the singer and the lyricist of that performance.[3] A second Library of Congress record, a catalog card for the same disc side dated June 1942, lists Stephens as the teller of "Night-herding (songs and stories)."[4]

Etching of cattle and a herdsman moving along a wooded track toward evening

Peter Moran, The Returning Herd, etching, c. 1885. An American herd at the end of the day, shown for the song's cattle; it has no connection to the song.

Not every early collector credited Stephens: N. Howard Thorp's 1921 edition of Songs of the Cowboys gives the song with no author's name, calling it a slightly reworked fragment of an old song and blaming a fire at his Palma, New Mexico, ranch for the loss of its remaining verses.[5] Stephens's own 1942 field recording reached the public in 1952 on the Library of Congress LP Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas, edited by Duncan Emrich.[3] The Traditional Ballad Index, which accepts Stephens as the author and files the song as Roud 4444, lists recordings by Marc Williams (Brunswick, c. 1931) and George Goebel (Conqueror, 1933).[1] The Index also cites printings in Folk Songs of North America and in two Girl Scout songbooks, among other collections.[1] Stephen Seifert arranges it in DAD tuning for Cowboy Songs, a campfire-minded collection of 37 western songs that he publishes himself, sold as a 78-page download with an MP3 recording of every song.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Night Herding Song"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Night Herding Song".
  2. Internet Archive: "John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (Sturgis & Walton, 1910)".
  3. Library of Congress: "The night herding song".
  4. Library of Congress: "Night-herding (songs and stories)".
  5. Internet Archive: "N. Howard Thorp, Songs of the Cowboys (Houghton Mifflin, 1921)".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  7. Image: Peter Moran, The Returning Herd, etching, c. 1885. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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