(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Songbook). Songs heard 'round the campfire on the lone prairie, including: Abilene * Along the Navaho Trail * Back in the Saddle Again * Buffalo Gals (Won't You Come Out Tonight?) * Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie * Don't Take Your Guns to Town * Git Along, Little Dogies * Happy Trails * Hold on Little Dogies, Hold On * Home on the Range * I Ride an Old Paint * Jingle Jangle Jingle (I Got Spurs) * The Old Chisholm Trail * Pistol Packin' Mama * (Ghost) Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend) * San Antonio Rose * Sioux City Sue * Strawberry Roan * The Yellow Rose of Texas * and more.

(Creative Concepts Publishing). This info-packed, 372-page collection features 200 American cowboy songs with complete lyrics, lead lines and guitar chords, plus an extensive introduction, notes on the songs, illustrations by J.K. Ralston throughout, a lexicon of cowboy terms, a general index and an index of titles and first lines, and more. Songs include: Billy the Kid * Blood on the Saddle * Buffalo Gals * Clementine * Dakota Land * The Girl I Left Behind Me * Going West * Jesse James * Johnny Cake * Old Paint * Punchin' Dough * Red River Valley * Red Wing * Shenandoah * Steamboat Bill * The Streets of Laredo * The Texas Cowboy * and many more.

Growing up beside the Chisholm Trail, captivated by the songs of passing cowboys and his bosom friend, an African American farmhand, John A. Lomax developed a passion for American folk songs that ultimately made him one of the foremost authorities on this fundamental aspect of Americana. Across many decades and throughout the country, Lomax and his informants created over five thousand recordings of America's musical heritage, including ballads, blues, children's songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs. He acted as honorary curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, directed the Slave Narrative Project of the WPA, and cofounded the Texas Folklore Society. Lomax's books include Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, American Ballads and Folk Songs, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, and Our Singing Country, the last three coauthored with his son Alan Lomax. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter is a memoir of Lomax's eventful life. It recalls his early years and the fruitful decades he spent on the road collecting folk songs, on his own and later with son Alan and second wife Ruby Terrill Lomax. Vibrant, amusing, often haunting stories of the people he met and recorded are the gems of this book, which also gives lyrics for dozens of songs. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter illuminates vital traditions in American popular culture and the labor that has gone into their preservation.

As a child, John Avery Lomax loved the songs he heard the cowboys singing along the nearby Chisholm Trail. He began writing them down at an early age. As John grew older, he traveled the country collecting and recording cowboy songs, helping to preserve many favorites.

Telling the fabled story of the men and women who shone brightly during the magical era of the singing cowboy movie star, this treasury features such famed cowboy singers as: Gene Autre, Binge Crossly, Dale Evens, Tit Guitar, Dorothy Page, Riders of the Purple Sage, TeX Rita, Marry Robins, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Ray Whitely, and dozens more.

Many associate early western music with the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but America’s first western music craze predates these “singing cowboys” by decades. Written by Tin Pan Alley songsters in the era before radio, the first popular cowboy and Indian songs circulated as piano sheet music and as cylinder and disc recordings played on wind-up talking machines. The colorful fantasies of western life depicted in these songs capitalized on popular fascination with the West stoked by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, and Edwin S. Porter’s film The Great Train Robbery. The talking machine music industry, centered in New York City, used state-of-the-art recording and printing technology to produce and advertise songs about the American West. Talking Machine West brings together for the first time the variety of cowboy, cowgirl, and Indian music recorded and sold for mass consumption between 1902 and 1918. In the book’s introductory chapters, Michael A. Amundson explains how this music reflected the nostalgic passing of the Indian and the frontier while incorporating modern ragtime music and the racial attitudes of Jim Crow America. Hardly Old West ditties, the songs gave voice to changing ideas about Indians and assimilation, cowboys, the frontier, the rise of the New Woman, and ethnic and racial equality. In the book’s second part, a chronological catalogue of fifty-four western recordings provides the full lyrics and history of each song and reproduces in full color the cover art of extant period sheet music. Each entry also describes the song’s composer(s), lyricist(s), and sheet music illustrator and directs readers to online digitized recordings of each song. Gorgeously illustrated throughout, this book is as entertaining as it is informative, offering the first comprehensive account of popular western recorded music in its earliest form.

As the United States expanded west in the 1800s, and cattle became big business, the figure of the young brash cattleman who rode with the herds quickly emerged as a cultural icon. Victorian Americans went crazy for cowboys, snapping up dime-store novels and sheet music, and turning out in droves for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. It was only a matter of time before someone brought together these three facets-entertainer, singer, and cowboy. And when Carl T. Sprague recorded the first hit cowboy record ("When the Work's All Done This Fall") in 1925, the singing cowboy as we know him was born. A singing cowboy himself, Douglas B. Green (better known as Ranger Doug from the Grammy-award-winning group Riders In The Sky) is uniquely suited to write the story of the singing cowboy. He has been collecting information and interviews on western music, films, and performers for nearly thirty years. In this volume, he traces this history from the early days of vaudeville and radio, through the heyday of movie westerns before World War II, to the current revival. He provides rich and careful analysis of the studio system that made men such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers famous, and he documents the role that country music and regional television stations played in carrying on the singing cowboy tradition after World War II. This book, lavishly illustrated with over 140 photos, is a wealth of information that comes out of decades of research. Green has unearthed never-before-published photos and rare movie posters-including one from an all-Black western, Harlem on the Prairie (1938). Through his close friendships with other singing cowboys and their families, Green is able to provide rare insights into the ways that some like Autry became stars and others like Raoul Walsh (who lost his eye in a shooting accident and later became a famous director) did not. Green also traces the history of cowboy music, from popular songs such as "Sweet Betsy from Pike" to the instantly recognizable harmonies of the Sons of the Pioneers. Green even speculates about just when the famous yodel became a ubiquitous part of the singing cowboy's repertoire. More important, Green reveals how the imagery of the singing cowboy has become such a potent force that even now country musicians don cowboy hats so as to symbolically take part in the legend. Nowhere has the recorded history of the singing cowboy and the film history been collected in one volume, and this book is sure to become the resource for students of the style. Co-published with the Country Music Foundation Press