Streets Of Laredo: A Song History

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"Streets of Laredo" belongs to a large group of ballads that the Traditional Ballad Index traces back to "The Unfortunate Rake," with which it shares its tune and meter.[1] The Index dates that ancestral ballad to 1790 and lists finds in England, Scotland, Ireland and the United States; in it, a young person near death, originally from syphilis though some versions substitute wounds or an unnamed illness, asks for a lavish military funeral.[2] Notes by Mike Yates or Rod Stradling, reproduced on Mainly Norfolk, name the oldest broadside version they know of, dating from the 1790s, "The Buck's Elegy."[3] The cowboy versions move the deathbed to the West, but not always to Laredo: in a survey of 150 texts, Thorp and Fife counted 39 set in Laredo or a similar place and 37 at Tom Sherman's Barroom or something like it.[1]

Bronze sculpture of a cowboy riding a rearing horse, holding a quirt aloft

Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, bronze, 1895, cast 1918. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Frank H. Maynard, a cowboy in southern Kansas during the 1870s, claimed that he wrote the cowboy words in 1876 by reworking an older lament about a dying girl that his fellow hands liked to sing.[4] He did not print his text, titled "The Dying Cowboy," until 1911 in Rhymes of the Range and Trail, and he told the story of its origin to Elmo Scott Watson in 1924.[4] The Ballad Index judges the claim possible on the dates but the evidence too thin to name Maynard as author.[1] Meanwhile John A. Lomax had already printed the song as "The Cowboy's Lament" in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, published by Sturgis & Walton in November 1910.[5]

Bentley Ball's "The Dying Cowboy" appeared on Columbia A3085, which the Discography of American Historical Recordings dates to about 1919.[6] The Ballad Index gives 1920 for the same disc, so the sources differ by a year.[1] The Index also records a run of further discs from the late 1920s, among them Vernon Dalhart (1927), Harry McClintock (1928) and Bradley Kincaid (1929).[1] Jules Verne Allen recorded "Cowboy's Lament" for Victor in Hollywood on April 8, 1929, and the discography, citing Meade as its source, credits Frank Maynard as composer.[7] That October, Dick Devall recorded the Tom Sherman's Barroom form of the song in Dallas, though it was not issued until 1931.[3]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Streets of Laredo, The [Laws B1]".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Unfortunate Rake, The".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "The Streets of Laredo".
  4. Sing Out!: "Streets of Laredo" (Unfortunate Rake, Part Three).
  5. Internet Archive: "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (John A. Lomax, 1910).
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia A3085 (10-in. double-faced)".
  7. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-50597. Cowboy's lament / Jules Verne Allen".