The Tenderfoot: A Song History
"The Tenderfoot" is a comic cowboy ballad, catalogued by folklorists as Laws B27 and Roud 3246, and also known as "The Horse Wrangler," "D-2 Horse Wrangler" and "Breaking in a Tenderfoot."[1] Its narrator is a newcomer persuaded that ranch work will be easy, who changes his mind after a fall and ends up quitting or being let go, and it is sung to the tune of "The Day I Played Base Ball."[1] John A. Lomax printed a text as "The Horse Wrangler" in his Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, a collection first published in 1910 and enlarged in 1916.[2]
W. Duke, Sons & Co., A Montana Cowboy, from the "Governors, Arms, Etc." series, commercial color lithograph, ca. 1888. A Montana cowboy on a tobacco trade card of about 1888, a few years before the song's earliest printing in Miles City, Montana, in 1894; the card has no connection to the song.
Who wrote it is disputed.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index gives its earliest date as an 1894 printing in the Miles City Montana Stock Growers' Journal, credited to R. J. Stovall, and notes that the Montana cowboy poet D. J. O'Malley claimed in 1932 to have written it in 1893.[1] O'Malley, born in New York City in 1867, grew up around Fort Keogh and went to work as a horse wrangler at fourteen, before riding for the N Bar N outfit and helping bring trail herds up from Texas.[3] He began writing verse in the 1880s and saw much of it printed in newspapers, including those of Miles City, and his papers at the Montana Historical Society include a poem titled "The D2 Horse Wrangler."[4] Against his claim, the collector Thorp, in his 1921 edition, credited the song to Yank Hitson of Denver, dated 1889, and reported collecting it in Arizona in 1899, while one R. D. Mack also claimed it; the Ballad Index editors weigh evidence on both sides and regard the authorship as somewhat uncertain.[1]
On the dulcimer, the song appears under its "Tenderfoot" title in Stephen Seifert's Cowboy Songs, one of 37 western songs set in DAD tuning in a 78-page book published by Seifert and offered as a download with an MP3 recording of each song.[5]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Horse Wrangler (The Tenderfoot)".
- Project Gutenberg: "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (John A. Lomax).
- Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame: "D.J. O'Malley".
- Archives West (Montana Historical Society): "D. J. O'Malley papers, 1863-1985".
- Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
- Image: W. Duke, Sons & Co., A Montana Cowboy, from the "Governors, Arms, Etc." series, commercial color lithograph, ca. 1888. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.