Ah, Cowboy Songs!

We American have long had a love affair with cowboy songs.  Maybe it’s the influence of singing cowboys like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, maybe the allure of Westerns in movies and on TV, or maybe the dusty trail is in our blood and bones!  In any case, the cowboy song is as American as mom and apple pie.  The cowboy may be romanticized in our imagination, but he is us, and we love him!

Master Chorus Eastside’s Celebrate America concert, this Sunday June 24 at Pickering Barn in Issaquah, spends a bit of time on cowboy songs, mostly in a delightful medley called Southwestern Suite, put together by a Texan, Randol Alan Bass.  And that’s the perfect connection, because Texas was a hotbed of cowboy music.  It was there that Southern mountain music and the West met, where cattle drives, Mexican vaqueros, and hillbilly tunes merged to create a unique culture and sound.

Cowboy songs, like all authentic folksongs, grew out of the cowboy’s everyday experience of work: driving cattle, eating dust, bad food, and dealing with the dangers of the trail.

They also nearly always included love as one of their themes, no doubt as an antidote to their lonely life on the prairie.  The opening number in the medley, Green Grow the Lilacs, actually began life centuries ago as a folksong in Scotland and was brought here by immigrants, but in this country it morphed into the story of an American soldier’s love for a Mexican girl.  It is said that Texas cowboys loved to sing this song, but Mexicans couldn’t understand the words, except “Green grow.”  Say it fast and it turns into gringo, and that’s the name they gave the cowboys!  This may or may not be true, but it’s certainly a colorful story.

One of my favorites has a cowboy cattle-driving call in the chorus, Whoopie-ti-yi-yo, Get Along Little Dogies.  The calls were loud, meant to carry across the plains, and usually moved in and out of a cowboy’s falsetto voice; the MCE singers love to shout out “whoopee-ti-yi-yo” at the end as a kind of yodeling call—no doubt very authentically!  Here is a particularly fine rendition of falsetto singing and cattle calling by the great cowboy singer Slim Whitman.

Another favorite from this medley actually has a mistaken identity!  It’s called The Rio Grande, but it’s not a cowboy song and it’s not about the Rio Grande River on the Texas/Mexico border.  It’s really a sea shanty about the Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state in Brazil.  Apparently gold was discovered there in the 18^th century, and the first verse refers to golden sand.  But, like all folksongs, it changed with the territory, so somehow as it moved north it became a cowboy song about heading southward for the Rio Grande in Texas.

And of course, we include the quintessential American folksong, Home on the Range, as a sing along.  One of MCE’s purposes is to maintain and promote our American song heritage, and our All-American Independence Celebration does just that.  So come and sing and enjoy American folksongs right along with MCE, and be a cowboy for a magical moment or two.

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic Director, Master Chorus Eastside