Whoopee, Ti Yi Yo, Git Along, Little Dogies
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-08-30

Day 167 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

This was very popular in the school concerts I've done over the years. In fact, because I'd done it sooo many times, I was able to do it in one take...after a false start because I didn't turn on the microphone.

Sandburg writes: "This widely sung piece also has the smell of saddle leather and long reaches of level prairies in it. It is plainly of Irish origin, connecting with the lilts and the ballads that begin, "As I was a-walking one morning." The word "choila" is Spanish and is pronounced as if spelled "choya." The "dogies" are the little yearling steers."

This is probably the best known cowboy song. The rhythm is taken from the movement of a horse. It dates back to then early trail-drive days, and is adapted from the Irish ballad "The Old Man Rocking the Cradle." The peak existence of the cowboy came in the decades after the Civil War. The earliest mention of Get Along Little Dogies was in the 1893 journal of Owen Wister, author of the classic Western novel, The Virginian.

Since Wyoming was the destination, it is presumed to have been composed after 1870-1871, when Texans first herded cattle northward into Wyoming Territory. Some cowboys sang of Montana as the destination; others mentioned no final destination, and merely described the problems of rounding up and driving cattle.

The word “dogie” refers to a motherless calf who had to eat grass before being mature enough to digest it. This caused the calf to develop a big stomach which cowboys referred to as “dough guts,” later shortened to “dogies.”

The Fading Cowboy

The big ranches of the West are now being cut up into small farms. The nester has come, and come to stay. Gone is the buffalo, the Indian warwhoop, the free grass of the open plain; — even the stinging lizard, the horned frog, the centipede, the prairie dog, the rattlesnake, are fast disappearing. Save in some of the secluded valleys of southern New Mexico, the old-time round-up is no more; the trails to Kansas and to Montana have become grass-grown or lost in fields of waving grain; the maverick steer, the regal longhorn, has been supplanted by his un-poetic but more beefy and profitable Polled Angus, Durham, and Hereford cousins from across the seas. The changing and romantic West of the early days lives mainly in story and in song. The last figure to vanish is the cowboy, the animating spirit of the vanishing era. He sits his horse easily as he rides through a wide valley, enclosed by mountains, clad in the hazy purple of coming night,— with his face turned steadily down the long, long road, "the road that the sun goes down." Dauntless, reckless, without the unearthly purity of Sir Galahad though as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, he is truly a knight of the twentieth century. A vagrant puff of wind shakes a corner of the crimson handkerchief knotted loosely at his throat; the thud of his pony's feet mingling with the jingle of his spurs is borne back; and as the careless, gracious, lovable figure disappears over the divide, the breeze brings to the ears, faint and far yet cheery still, the refrain of a cowboy song:

Whoopee ti yi, git along, little dogies;
It's my misfortune and none of your own. Whoopee ti yi, git along, little dogies;
For you know Wyoming will be your new home.

--by the pioneering American song-catcher John A. Lomax in his 1918 revision of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads