The Cowboy's Dream: A Song History

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"The Cowboy's Dream" is a traditional cowboy song that pictures the afterlife in the language of the range, as a heavenly roundup.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index traces it to at least 1893, when it appeared in Cow-Boy Life in Texas, and its references include versions titled "Grand Round-Up," "The Cowboy's Heaven" and "Roll On, Little Dogies."[1] One account the Index cites holds that the words were built around the hymn "In the Sweet By and By," while the Index's editor has always heard it sung to "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."[1]

Bronze sculpture of two bulls with heads locked together, pushing against each other.

Solon Hannibal Borglum, Bulls Fighting, bronze, 1899–1900, cast 1906–07. Range cattle in bronze, shown for the song's heavenly roundup; the sculpture has no connection to the song.

Who made the song is unsettled, and sources differ.[1] In the 1921 edition of Songs of the Cowboys, N. Howard Thorp wrote that Wait Roberts of the Double Diamond Ranch in the White Mountains gave it to him in 1898, and passed on a claim that the father of a Texas Ranger captain named Roberts wrote it.[2] Other writers have credited the words to Will C. Barnes, who reportedly believed he had learned them in 1886 or 1887; the Ballad Index, pointing to a fuller discussion elsewhere, concludes that several people contributed and none can claim the whole.[1] John A. Lomax had already printed it in the first edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910, with a footnote naming "My Bonnie" as its air.[3]

Carl T. Sprague recorded it for Victor at Camden, New Jersey, on June 22, 1926, singing to his own guitar with two fiddlers behind him, and it was issued on Victor 20122.[4] Other records followed from Vernon Dalhart, Marc Williams, Jules Allen, Goebel Reeves and Bradley Kincaid between 1927 and 1934.[1] On the dulcimer, Stephen Seifert sets it in DAD tuning in Cowboy Songs, a book he publishes himself that gathers 37 western songs of cattle drives, chases and the odd romance.[5]

Our book that contains the song "The Cowboy's Dream"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Cowboy's Dream".
  2. Internet Archive: "Songs of the Cowboys" (N. Howard Thorp, 1921).
  3. Internet Archive: "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (John A. Lomax, 1910).
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-35542. The cowboy's dream / Carl T. Sprague".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  6. Image: Solon Hannibal Borglum, Bulls Fighting, bronze, 1899–1900, cast 1906–07. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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