The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #170933 Message #4137986
Posted By: GUEST,Psuedonymous
27-Feb-22 - 02:43 PM
Thread Name: Origins: The Dying Cowboy
Subject: RE: Origins: The Dying Cowboy
The best thing I know on the mess literature surrounding this song and its relatives is the 2018 Katherine Briggs Lecture by Richard Jenkins, which I have read and which is available online if you look carefully enough.
It is called
"The Unfortunate Rake’s progress: a case-study of the construction of folklore by collectors and scholars."
Some of the sources etc used b Jenkins can be seen here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0015587X.2019.1585711?scroll=top&needAccess=true
See also here: https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=46310&threadid=46310
Joyce by the way, Randy, never heard the My Jewel song; he merely published a fragment sent to an antiquarian in a letter.
A set of inaccurate liner notes written by Goldstein and a character called Bert Lloyd account for a lot of the nonsense written about this song, not helped by the fact that Lloyd wrote his own versions (as folk singers do, nothing wrong with that as such)....