Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Day 166 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
It's a rough start to this recording, but it's too long of a song for more than a couple of takes (especially when there's only one day to record). At least there were only 19 verses. I noticed in my copy of North Carolina Folklore (volume three of seven volumes published by Duke University Press) this song has 29 verses!!
Sandburg knew John and Alan Lomax and they traded songs at times. This song was first published in John Lomax's ground breaking first work, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). At the time many thought the collection had little value. It went through many additions and expansions of the years.
Sandburg writes: The Lone Star Trail is "a cowboy classic of saddle and trail, ranch and range. The verses are from John Lomax of Texas and Jay Monaghan of Wyoming. . . . Certain versions have extended and lurid conversations between the cowboy and the lady. "
NOTE from The Traditional Ballad Index: "Although the Chisholm Trail was open for less than two decades, millions of cattle traveled north over it. More than any of the other trails from Texas, it was the major route of cattle and horses, cowboys and cowmen, to Kansas railheads as well as the new ranches springing up all over the former ranges of the buffalo and the Plains Indians between 1867 and the Big Die-Up of 1886-1887. In fact, the name Chisholm Trail came to be applied indiscriminately to all the cattle trails north out of Texas."
Officially called the Great Cattle Extinction, it would come down in Western history as the Big Die-Up. When it ended, most of the large ranching operations on the Northern Range died up, as well. The old-time cattle industry, the trail drives that fed it, and the Old West itself, never recovered. (from AmericanCowboy.com)
Day 166 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
It's a rough start to this recording, but it's too long of a song for more than a couple of takes (especially when there's only one day to record). At least there were only 19 verses. I noticed in my copy of North Carolina Folklore (volume three of seven volumes published by Duke University Press) this song has 29 verses!!
Sandburg knew John and Alan Lomax and they traded songs at times. This song was first published in John Lomax's ground breaking first work, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). At the time many thought the collection had little value. It went through many additions and expansions of the years.
Sandburg writes: The Lone Star Trail is "a cowboy classic of saddle and trail, ranch and range. The verses are from John Lomax of Texas and Jay Monaghan of Wyoming. . . . Certain versions have extended and lurid conversations between the cowboy and the lady. "
NOTE from The Traditional Ballad Index: "Although the Chisholm Trail was open for less than two decades, millions of cattle traveled north over it. More than any of the other trails from Texas, it was the major route of cattle and horses, cowboys and cowmen, to Kansas railheads as well as the new ranches springing up all over the former ranges of the buffalo and the Plains Indians between 1867 and the Big Die-Up of 1886-1887. In fact, the name Chisholm Trail came to be applied indiscriminately to all the cattle trails north out of Texas."
Officially called the Great Cattle Extinction, it would come down in Western history as the Big Die-Up. When it ended, most of the large ranching operations on the Northern Range died up, as well. The old-time cattle industry, the trail drives that fed it, and the Old West itself, never recovered. (from AmericanCowboy.com)
