The Texas Rangers: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"The Texas Rangers" is a traditional ballad of unknown authorship in which a young man leaves his family and sweetheart to join a company of rangers, then lives through a bloody fight with Native American warriors that kills many of his comrades.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index dates the song to at least 1874 and files it as Laws A8 and Roud 480.[1] Belden and other scholars heard strong echoes of older British ballads in it, while another reference work calls it a probable rewrite of a Civil War song; the Index points to a close twin, "Come All Ye Southern Soldiers," collected by Sharp in the North Carolina mountains, which tells nearly the same story with the names, places and enemies changed.[1] Which form came first is not settled in the sources consulted here.[1]

Painting of a mounted soldier pulling a dismounted comrade up onto his galloping horse while other riders follow across dry grassland

Charles Schreyvogel, My Bunkie, oil on canvas, finished 1899. Mounted frontier troopers at a gallop, painted in 1899, shown for the ballad's company of riders; the painting shows cavalry, not Texas Rangers, and has no connection to the song.

Collectors found the ballad from the Southern mountains and the Midwest to the Northeast and Newfoundland.[1] It appears in a 1929 printing of John A. Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, a collection first published in 1910.[2] West Virginia University's Louis Watson Chappell Collection holds a performance by Fred Thomas, sung unaccompanied at Parkersburg, West Virginia, on July 18, 1938.[3] In 1942 Lomax recorded Sloan Matthews of Alpine, Texas, singing it at Pecos, and the Library of Congress issued that performance in 1952 on Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas.[4] Commercial records came earlier: the Ballad Index lists Ernest Stoneman's version on OKeh from 1926 and Harry "Mac" McClintock's on Victor from 1928.[1]

Stephen Seifert sets it in Cowboy Songs, his own 78-page book of 37 western songs for dulcimer in DAD tuning, each paired with an MP3 recording; this one is played with a capo at the fourth fret.[5]

Our book that contains the song "The Texas Rangers"

Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "The Texas Rangers".
  2. Project Gutenberg: "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads," collected by John A. Lomax.
  3. West Virginia University Libraries: "Texas Rangers" (Fred Thomas, Louis Watson Chappell Collection).
  4. Library of Congress: "The Texas Rangers" (Sloan Matthews, 1942).
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  6. Image: Charles Schreyvogel, My Bunkie, oil on canvas, finished 1899. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song