The Hills Of Mexico: A Song History

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"The Hills of Mexico" belongs to the family of the older "Buffalo Skinners," and the Traditional Ballad Index files it under the double title "Boggy Creek or The Hills of Mexico" as Laws B10b, Roud 634.[1] In the Index's outline, it tells of a cowboy crew working far from home whose quarrel with an abusive boss ends in his death.[1] The researcher Jürgen Kloss traces the whole family to the Maine lumbercamp song "Canaday I O" by way of a buffalo hunters' song from the country around Fort Griffin, Texas, and treats the cattle-drive story as a later reworking.[2]

Bronze sculpture of a cowboy in a wide-brimmed hat clinging to a bucking horse that rears on its front legs.

Frederic Remington, The Outlaw, bronze, 1906. A cowboy on a bucking horse, shown for the song's cowboy crew; the bronze has no connection to the song.

Texas folklorists got the cowboy form into print in the 1920s.[2] W. P. Webb included an incomplete text, "Boggus Creek," in the Texas Folklore Society's Coffee in the Gourd in 1923, and J. Evetts Haley published the first full version in the Society's 1927 volume, taken from a cowboy named James "Honey Jim" Mullens, who said he had learned it in the early 1880s.[2] The Ballad Index, citing Haley, gives 1927 as the song's earliest date.[1] John and Alan Lomax printed a nearly identical "Boggy Creek" from H. Knight of Sterling City, Texas, in the enlarged 1938 edition of Cowboy Songs, and Kloss identifies that text as the model for Woody Guthrie's "Buffalo Skinners."[2]

Under the title "Hills of Mexico," the Kentucky singer and banjo player Roscoe Holcomb recorded it for Folkways on The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward (1962), whose notes call his performance "more of a fragment, than a complete song."[3] A Holcomb performance of the song also appears on Smithsonian Folkways' Mountain Music of Kentucky, drawn from John Cohen's recordings of eastern Kentucky musicians.[4] Sara Grey learned her version from Holcomb, and a recording of it by Grey and her son Kieron Means was the Country Dance and Song Society's song of the month for April 2020.[5] Dulcimer players will find "The Hills Of Mexico" listed apart from both "Buffalo Skinners" and "The Trail To Mexico" in Stephen Seifert's Cowboy Songs, a self-published download of 37 western songs arranged in DAD tuning, with an MP3 for each.[6]

Our book that contains the song "The Hills Of Mexico"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Boggy Creek or The Hills of Mexico".
  2. Jürgen Kloss, Just Another Tune: "On The Trail Of The 'Buffalo Skinners'".
  3. Smithsonian Folkways: "The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward" (FA 2363, liner notes).
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: "Mountain Music of Kentucky" (SFW 40077, liner notes).
  5. Country Dance and Song Society: "April 2020: The Hills of Mexico".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  7. Image: Frederic Remington, The Outlaw, bronze, 1906. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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