The Strawberry Roan: A Song History

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"The Strawberry Roan" began as a poem by Curley Fletcher, who probably wrote it around 1914; it first appeared in 1915 in the Record of Globe, Arizona, under the title "The Outlaw Broncho."^[1] Fletcher was born in San Francisco in 1892 and is remembered as a poet of California's Owens Valley, where the Laws Railroad Museum honors him each September.^[2] The story is a simple comic one: a cowboy short of work is offered a job on condition that he ride the roan, and is thrown almost at once.^[1] The text most singers follow comes from Fletcher's 1917 book Rhymes of the Roundup.^[1] The performer Powder River Jack Lee later credited the words to one Frank R. Chamberlain in 1894, but nothing else supports that claim, and all known versions seem to derive from Fletcher.^[1]

The familiar chorus was not Fletcher's: he teamed with the Hollywood songwriters Nat Vincent and Fred Howard to issue the piece as sheet music, and they altered his words and added the chorus, which made him furious.^[1] The song reached records quickly, with versions by the Arizona Wranglers in 1929, Paul Hamblin on Victor in 1930, Frank Luther and Carson Robison in 1932, and Bill Boyd and His Cowboy Ramblers in 1934, and it inspired sequels, two of them by Wilf Carter.^[1] Fletcher's verse was gathered in Songs of the Sage in 1931, a collection reissued in 1986 with a preface by Hal Cannon, and the museum credits Marty Robbins with later making the song famous.^[2]

Stephen Seifert includes it among the 37 western songs in his Cowboy Songs, a 78-page dulcimer book whose arrangements are all set in DAD tuning, each paired with an MP3 recording.^[3]

Sources

1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Strawberry Roan, The [Laws B18]".
2. Laws Railroad Museum and Historical Site: "Curley Fletcher and Good Ol' Days".
3. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
4. Image: Théodore Géricault, Fighting Horses, watercolor over graphite, c. 1820. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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