Let me amend my previous assertion that black folks were all but absent from the "Old West."

Texas is/was an obvious exception -- certainly part of the archtypal "West," it also has a history as one of the states of the Confederacy and -- in large sections of East Texas, if not elsewhere -- had a substiantial cotton-plantation economy featuring slavery and sharecropping, a hotbed of white/black racial conflict. Texas has always been as much a southern state as a western one.

West of the Pecos, however, black folks are *still* almost entirely absent. Cowboy vigilante justice (which seems to me to be the subject of the song in question) historically has had little or nothing to do with racism, certainly not against black folks (although arguably against brown and red people).