I cannot believe that all of my work has been wiped out! I was about ready to post this when something happened and~ZAP! My post disappeared!

What I was listing were songs of the Fifties and Sixties, as well as more recent that are modern-day ballads. That is, they're written by contemporaries. Let's try this again. Off the top of my head comes this list (again~if I can remember all of them again):
Big Iron
Running Gun
Ride Cowboy Ride
Five Brothers
Don't Take Your Gun
Ghost Train
Jimmy Martinez
They're Hanging Me Tonight
Saddle Tramp
Ballad of the Alamo
Three Bells
Big Bad John and Cajun Queen (They're mainly spoken, so I'm not sure they count.)
Sink the Bismarck
Battle of New Orleans
The Master's Touch
Faleena
El Paso
El Paso City
The Hanging Tree
Run Softly, Blue River
Moody River
Take a Message to Mary
The Devil Went Down to Georgia
The Ballad of Paladin
Rawhide
Yellow Bird
Scarlet Ribbons (for Her Hair)
Coward of the County
Valley of the Moon
Sergeant Buffalo (I'm still looking for my 45 to supply the lyrics in the unresolved thread.)
Johnny Yuma~The Rebel
North to Alaska
The Ballad of the Alamo
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Ode to Billy Joe
Fancy
The Ballad of Cat Ballou
My Rifle, My Pony and Me
Rio Bravo
Sugarfoot

Face it: Cowboy movies of the Fifties & Sixties are loaded with ballads: 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Rancho Notorious, Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), and The Man from Laramie. I found three sites that address these songs. Here's a link to one site:
http://www.rootsandrhythm.com/roots/COUNTRY/country_cowboy.htm
I occasionally watch The Western Channel, and I noticed all of these songs in the storytelling tradition of ballads. Most are average, but some are rather interesting, with not-all-that-bad melodies.

This is about half of what I had. *SIGH* If I'd been working in Text Document, perhaps it would have saved it.