The Streets of Laredo
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-08-27

Day 164 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "A cowboy classic known in several tunes from the spaces patrolled by the Northwest Mounted to those where the Texas Rangers keep law and order, more or less.

"The air is old Irish and many of the lines are almost literally from old broadsides peddled in Dublin these years now gone."

From the Traditional Ballad Index: One of the large group of ballads ("The Bard of Armagh," "Saint James Hospital," "The Streets of Laredo") ultimately derived from "The Unfortunate Rake." All use the same tune and metre, and all involve a person dying as a result of a wild life, but the nature of the tragedy varies according to local circumstances.
N. Howard "Jack" Thorp, Songs of the Cowboys studied 150 versions of this text.