From Lonn Taylor & Ingrid Maar, "The American Cowboy" (1983):

“Lomax… severely bowdlerized some ballads, thinking, quite correctly, that the sexual allusions they contained would not be acceptable to any publisher. The original versions, as preserved in the Lomax Papers, offer an insight into the cowboy’s attitudes toward cattle and women that Cowboy Songs does not. In a typescript copy of ‘The Old Chisholm Trail'... we find

My foot in the stirrup, my ass in the saddle
I ’ll bid goodbye to these God damn cattle.

instead of Lomax’s published

Feet in the stirrup and seat in the saddle
I hung and rattled them longhorn cattle.

and

There’s old Miss Annie she’s a mighty fine squaw
She lives on the banks of the old Wichita.

I wanted for to frig her and I offered her a quarter
Says she, 'Bill Moore, I’m a gentleman’s daughter.'

instead of

Well, I met a little gal and I offered her a quarter
She says, 'Young man, I ’m a gentleman’s daughter.'

Verses like

I’m going down south fore the weather gets cold
I'm going down south to get some tallow on my pole

and

I’m going down south just whooping and yelling
If I don't get a woman I’ll take a heifer yearling

didn’t get into print in any form. As Lomax himself said of the song, ‘many stanzas are not mailable.’

“The point is not that Lomax was an inaccurate collector or a prude, but that Cowboy Songs was not a terribly accurate reflection of the song vocabulary of the average cowboy, which included many songs that had nothing to do with cattle and did not include many of the supposed songs, actually poems, included in Cowboy Songs. Significantly, the first edition of the book contained 112 texts and only fourteen tunes."