The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #67126   Message #1119803
Posted By: Lighter
20-Feb-04 - 12:23 AM
Thread Name: Origins: Old Chisholm Trail
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: OLD CHISHOLM TRAIL
The text printed in the Brown Collection & posted by GUEST is precisely that in Lomax 1910, less one stanza.

Worth mentioning: the single tune in Lomax 1910 is not the one most commonly sung today. It is rather the more monotonous chant-like modal (or minor - I can never figure this stuff out) tune used, for example, by John Lomax, Jr., on his 1950s Folkways recording of Texas songs. (It's more readily available on the '90s Smithsonian-Folkways CD, "Cowboy Songs on Folkways," edited by Guy Logsdon.)

Unless I am very much mistaken, the stanzas sung by Harry McClintock and Jules Allen (and printed in Allen's 1920's book, "Cowboy Lore") are also from - or identical to - some of those in Lomax 1910. Both of these singers use the more common major melody, however.

R. W. Gordon received a handful of independent versions from correspondents in the 1920s. Will post when I can dig them out.

The earliest printings of bawdy versions were in the 1920s. Jerry Silverman has an especially crapulous but almost certainly authentic one in "The Dirty Song Book" (1982). Oscar Brand recorded at least three semi-bowdlerized and partially rewritten bawdy texts.

A common bawdy chorus is the ingeniously parodic, "Come an' tie my root around a tree, around a tree."

A ribald version sung by F-4 pilots in the Vietnam War includes,

             I'd rather be a peckerless man
             Than to fly this bent-up garbage can.