Tyin' A Knot In The Devil's Tail: A Song History
"Tyin' A Knot In The Devil's Tail" started life as "The Sierry Petes," the first poem written by Gail Gardner, a Prescott, Arizona, native born in 1892 who went east to Phillips Exeter and Dartmouth and then came home to work cattle.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index dates it to 1917 and sums up the plot as a comic brawl: two cowboys heading back to camp from a spree in town run into the Devil, who wants their souls, and they leave him roped, branded and with his tail tied in knots.[2] A story long told about the poem has Gardner writing it on a train between college and Arizona, but Dartmouth's alumni magazine says the poem dates instead from 1917, when he took time off from ranching and went to Washington, D.C., to enlist.[3] The same article explains that the "Sierry Petes" are the Sierra Prieta range near Prescott and that the cowboy Buster Jig was Gardner himself, while the Ballad Index identifies his partner Sandy Bob as Bob Heckle.[3][2]
Pair of Rowel Spurs, Mexican, iron alloy, silver and copper alloy, 19th century. A pair of nineteenth-century Mexican rowel spurs, shown for the cowboys of Gail Gardner's poem; the spurs have no connection to the song.
The poem was an immediate success with those who heard it, and in time it turned up in folk song collections under several names, among them John and Alan Lomax's American Ballads and Folk Songs.[1][2] On November 3, 1930, in Hollywood, "Powder River" Jack Lee, with Kitty Lee on guitar, recorded it for Victor as "Tying a knot in the devil's tail," and the label's ledgers credit the Lees as its writers.[4] Lee went on claiming the song in his songbooks and on record labels, and his version renamed the two cowboys, yet a Sharlot Hall Museum history treats Gardner's authorship as certain.[5] The Ballad Index likewise judges Gardner almost certainly the author, noting that Gardner held the copyright and that the other claimants appear to lack real supporting documentation.[2] Warren Miller recounts that Gardner and Curley Fletcher, another poet whose work Lee had recorded, once confronted Lee in Phoenix, then let him go because, in Gardner's view, Lee had nothing worth taking.[1]
Other recordings came from singers such as Cisco Houston and Harry Jackson, and John I. White, as summarized in the Ballad Index, reports that Gardner came to accept others singing his piece while still resenting it when they got the words wrong.[2] Gardner himself sang it at the first Arizona Cowboy Poets Gathering in 1988, at age 95, from a small stage, and his grandson Gail Steiger calls it Gardner's "big hit."[6] Gardner's yarn also rides along with the campfire songs in Stephen Seifert's Cowboy Songs, where dulcimer players get it in DAD tuning, as a printable page and an audio track, alongside some three dozen other songs of the range.[7]
Sources
- Sharlot Hall Museum: "Real Men Do Write Poetry: Welcome Cowboys" (Warren Miller).
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Tying a Knot in the Devil's Tail [Laws B17]".
- Dartmouth Alumni Magazine: "The Story of Buster Jig".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix PBVE-61049. Tying a knot in the devil's tail / Kitty Lee ; Powder River Jack Lee".
- Sharlot Hall Museum: "The Saga of 'Powder River' Jack & Kitty Lee" (Parker Anderson).
- Sharlot Hall Museum: "Cowboy Poetry and Sharlot Hall" (Gail Steiger).
- Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
- Image: Pair of Rowel Spurs, Mexican, iron alloy, silver and copper alloy, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.