Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 6 days ago
Day 167 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
This is, to me, the quintessential cowboy song. Sandburg call this "a magnificent find," while Lomax speaks of this piece as having in its language a "Homeric quality." Its words are blunt, direct, odorous, plain and made-to-hand, having the sound to some American ears that the Greek language of Homer had for the Greeks of that time.
Sandburg writes: "This is one of the magnificent finds of John Lomax for American folk song lore. It is the framework of a big, sweeping novel of real life, condensed into a few telling stanzas.
"It is of the years when outfits of men went onto the Great Plains and killed buffalo for the hides. The carcasses were skinned by thousands and left on the open prairies for the crows and buzzards to pick to the bone. We may hunt for a harder sardonic than that of Crego telling the men they had been "extravagant" and were in debt to him. They killed him; it is told as casually and as frankly as the doing of the bloody deed and their immediate forgetfulness about it except as one of many passing difficulties of that summer.
Day 167 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
This is, to me, the quintessential cowboy song. Sandburg call this "a magnificent find," while Lomax speaks of this piece as having in its language a "Homeric quality." Its words are blunt, direct, odorous, plain and made-to-hand, having the sound to some American ears that the Greek language of Homer had for the Greeks of that time.
Sandburg writes: "This is one of the magnificent finds of John Lomax for American folk song lore. It is the framework of a big, sweeping novel of real life, condensed into a few telling stanzas.
"It is of the years when outfits of men went onto the Great Plains and killed buffalo for the hides. The carcasses were skinned by thousands and left on the open prairies for the crows and buzzards to pick to the bone. We may hunt for a harder sardonic than that of Crego telling the men they had been "extravagant" and were in debt to him. They killed him; it is told as casually and as frankly as the doing of the bloody deed and their immediate forgetfulness about it except as one of many passing difficulties of that summer.
