Utah Carroll: A Song History

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"Utah Carroll," also found as "Utah Carl" and "Utah Carol," is a cowboy ballad in which a cowhand mourns his partner, who is killed in a stampede after pulling the boss's daughter out of the herd's path.[1] It carries the number B4 in G. Malcolm Laws's ballad classification and 1929 in the Roud index, and the Traditional Ballad Index dates it to 1910, when John A. Lomax printed it in his Cowboy Songs.[1] It still stands in later printings of Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, given there without any headnote on its source.[2] Who wrote it is uncertain: Logsdon, in notes to a cowboy-song recording, credited N. Howard Thorp, but the Index's editors point out that Thorp never put it in his own Songs of the Cowboys, not even the 1922 edition that came out after Lomax had printed it.[1]

Bronze sculpture of a cowboy clinging to a rearing, twisting horse

Frederic Remington, The Rattlesnake, bronze, 1905, revised 1908; this cast before 1939. A cowboy struggling to stay on a shying horse, shown for the ballad's cowhands and the stampede that kills one of them; the bronze has no connection to the song.

The ballad travelled well beyond the range, turning up in regional collections from Mississippi to the Adirondacks.[1] The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection at Missouri State University holds a version titled "Utah Carl," sung by Reba Glaze in Springdale, Arkansas, on July 23, 1958.[3] On records, the Texas singer Carl T. Sprague, reportedly dubbed "The Original Singing Cowboy," cut it for Victor on August 24, 1927, accompanied by two violins and guitar.[4] Other early discs came from Charles Nabell on Okeh around 1925, Marc Williams on Brunswick and the Cartwright Brothers on Columbia, while Frank Wheeler and Monroe Lamb recorded a version called "Utah Carl's Last Ride."[1] Among the 37 western songs in Stephen Seifert's self-published Cowboy Songs, a 78-page dulcimer book pitched for campfire playing, "Utah Carroll" is arranged in DAD tuning and comes with its own MP3.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Utah Carroll"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Utah Carroll [Laws B4]".
  2. Project Gutenberg: "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (John A. Lomax).
  3. Missouri State University, Max Hunter Folk Song Collection: "Utah Carl".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Carl T. Sprague".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  6. Image: Frederic Remington, The Rattlesnake, bronze, 1905, revised 1908; this cast before 1939. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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