What we do know is that cowboys mostly sang the same songs as other folks--the popular songs and standards of the day, learned back East or in churches, saloons or music halls, from minstrel shows or oral tradition or even from sheet music. And those songs often provided the tunes to which range-grown poetry was set (circulated, among other means, by local newspapers). The image we now have of cowboys mostly singing lots of songs about the trail was formed by the radio and film industries. It's also a modern notion that there was general agreement about what tune went with which song, as that was rather a fluid, mix-and-match affair (as with early hymn-singing). We know from collectors that a cowboy might use whatever limited set of tunes he already knew for a new song, or cobble up a new one, with little uniformity from one trailhand to the next, and many could only half-sing, half-recite anyway. No wonder the tunes that have been collected, if not lifted from well-known songs, tend to be simple, nondescript and of limited range.

One common practice, now odd to our ears, was to end a song by dropping into speech on the last line. And ballads tended to be sung with free rhythms, not in metronomic lock step, as is the modern style. Alan Lomax greatly disliked the way folk revivalists sang cowboy songs because their delivery was so artificial in this regard.