Zebra Dun: A Song History

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"Zebra Dun" is a cowboy ballad in which a well-read newcomer is taken for a tenderfoot by the cowhands, until he handles the wild horse they let him try and is hired.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index files it as Laws B16 and Roud 3237, and lists its author as unknown.[1] The Index passes on a guess from Larkin's Singing Cowboy that the name began as a dun horse wearing a Z-bar brand, which the Index finds plausible but notes was offered without evidence.[1] That variant name does turn up on a Library of Congress catalog card, "Z-bar dun (also called Zebra dun)," sung by Sloan Matthews for John A. Lomax at Pecos, Texas, in 1942.[2]

Bronze sculpture of a rider in a broad hat on a galloping horse

Frederic Remington, Trooper of the Plains, bronze, 1908, cast before 1939. A cavalry trooper rather than a cowboy, shown for its horse and rider; it has no connection to the song.

The cowboy and collector N. Howard "Jack" Thorp, in the 1921 enlarged edition of his Songs of the Cowboys, noted that he first heard the song from Randolph Reynolds on the Carrizozo Flats of New Mexico in 1890.[3][4] The writer Elijah Wald says it was already in Thorp's self-published first edition of 1908, a date that matches the earliest one the Ballad Index gives for the song.[4][1] Lomax printed it as "The Zebra Dun" on page 154 of his Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, published in November 1910.[5]

Jules Verne Allen recorded it for Victor in El Paso on April 30, 1928, singing to his own guitar, and the record was issued as Victor V-40022.[6] Folklorists kept finding it afterward: John and Ruby Lomax recorded Frank Goodwyn singing it with guitar at Falfurrias, Texas, in April 1939, and Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin recorded Troy Cambron performing it with guitar at the Arvin FSA camp in California in August 1940.[7][8] Stephen Seifert includes it, in DAD tuning, in Cowboy Songs, a dulcimer book of 37 western songs that comes with an MP3 recording of each song.[9]

Our book that contains the song "Zebra Dun"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Zebra Dun, The [Laws B16]".
  2. Library of Congress: "Z-bar dun (also called Zebra dun)".
  3. Internet Archive: "Songs of the Cowboys" (N. Howard Thorp, 1921).
  4. Elijah Wald: "Zebra Dun (Jack Thorpe)".
  5. Internet Archive: "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (John A. Lomax, 1910).
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-42257. Zebra dun / Jules Verne Allen".
  7. Library of Congress: "Zebra Dun" (Frank Goodwyn, Falfurrias, Texas, 1939).
  8. Library of Congress: "Zebra Dun" (Troy Cambron, Arvin FSA Camp, 1940).
  9. Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
  10. Image: Frederic Remington, Trooper of the Plains, bronze, 1908, cast before 1939. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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