The Railroad Corral: A Song History

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"The Railroad Corral" started out as a poem by Joseph Mills Hanson, and it was in print by the autumn of 1904: the Wilmington, Delaware, Evening Journal ran it on October 7 of that year under the heading "Cowboy Song," crediting Hanson "in Leslie's Month-," a line cut short on the page so that the magazine's full title does not appear.[1] Hanson, who lived from 1876 to 1960, later gathered it into his own collection, Frontier Ballads, published in Chicago by A. C. McClurg in 1910 with illustrations by Maynard Dixon.[2] There it keeps the title "Cowboy Song" and sits in the book's section of prairie poems, tracing a cattle outfit's single long day from before sunrise to the end of the drive at the railroad shipping pens.[3]

Wide painting of a flat dusky plain under a pale sky, with the twin Spanish Peaks rising on the horizon

Samuel Colman, Spanish Peaks, Southern Colorado, Late Afternoon, oil on canvas, 1887. Open Western plains below the Spanish Peaks of Colorado in 1887, shown for the cowboy country of Hanson's poem; the painting has no connection to the song.

That same year John A. Lomax included the poem in the first edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads as "The Railroad Corral," giving no author's name and a text that departs from Hanson's in small details, such as a chuck wagon where Hanson has a grub-wagon.[4] Its authorship then became a puzzle for later scholars; the Denver Public Library's Western History subject index records 1967 articles on the search for the song's author, one of which named Hanson as the writer of "Cowboy Song."[5] Among its commercial recordings, Rex Allen cut it for Decca in Los Angeles on May 16, 1956, backed by Victor Young's orchestra and chorus, for the LP Decca DL-8402.[6]

Mountain dulcimer players can find it in Stephen Seifert's Cowboy Songs, a downloadable book he issues himself, where it is one of 37 western songs set in DAD tuning and comes with its own separate PDF and recording.[7]

Our book that contains the song "The Railroad Corral"

Sources

  1. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: "Evening Journal (Wilmington, Del.), October 7, 1904, Image 4".
  2. Library of Congress: "Frontier ballads" (Joseph Mills Hanson, 1910).
  3. Project Gutenberg: Joseph Mills Hanson, "Frontier Ballads".
  4. Internet Archive (Cornell University Library copy): John A. Lomax, "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (1910).
  5. Denver Public Library Digital Collections: "Cowboys. Songs" (Western History Subject Index).
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Decca matrix L 9235. The railroad corral / Rex Allen".
  7. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  8. Image: Samuel Colman, Spanish Peaks, Southern Colorado, Late Afternoon, oil on canvas, 1887. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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