On Sun, Dec 06, 1998, joeoffer@my-dejanews.com (Joe Offer) wrote:
A request for "My Home's in Montana" at the Mudcat Cafe generated quite a discussion about the background of this song, but nobody had any definite answers. Is this a traditional song, or just one of the many "Cowboy Songs" that came out of Tin Pan Alley? I found the lyrics in the "Girl Scout Pocket Songbook" and in "The Ditty Bag," but not in any of the more reputable folk songbooks. Can anyone give us a background on this song?
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This song, which is a version of "The Cowboy's Lament" or "The Streets of Laredo" appeared in 1931 in the book Singing Cowboy by Margaret Larkin (NY: Alfred A. Knopf). In her headnotes she says "This version of the more familiar "Streets of Laredo" was given me by a Montana puncher. Some real folk poet must have distilled these rich stanzas from the rather diffuse Laredo incident. ...... " Lomax quotes this tune and the first verse (starting "My home's in Montana, I wear a bandana,") from Larkin in the 1938 edition of his Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (NY: McMillan).
BTW, in my Oklahoma and East Texas youth -- before Larkin's book -- I knew this song in the Streets of Laredo version, but with the tune as given in Larkin. This tune is derived from an Irish tune called "Norah McShane" while the more-familiar tune is from "The Bard of Armagh." (This latter tune is the one that can be heard at Digital Tradition under "Cowboy's Lament". As far as I know, the first publication of the words to "The Streets of Laredo" was in Songs of the Cowboys by N. Howard ("Jack") Thorp (NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908). Jack wrote that he had learned it in Wisner, Nebraska in 1886, and that "authorship is usually credited to Troy Hale, of Battle Creek, Nebraska."
Sam Hinton
La Jolla, CA
Thanks, Sam. wish we could get you to visit us here every once in a while.