Early cowboy songs and musical culture in the American West, 1870-1920
Creators: name: Zattiero, Joanna Ray
Publisher: name: The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 2020
Subjects: Cowboy songs
American music
Cowboy music
Vernacular music

description: Drawing on existing musicological study of popular song culture of the Western United States from roughly 1870 to 1920, as well as work on folk music, folklore and literary studies, genre studies, cultural history, and my own archival research, this dissertation examines the role of cowboy music within the larger realm of popular and folk songs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the musical culture of the Western United States. While no formal definition of cowboy music currently exists within musicological scholarship, I propose defining it broadly as the music that cowboys (and cowgirls) composed, performed, and consumed and that directly related topically to the cowboy lifestyle in the Western United States between mid to late nineteenth century and mid twentieth century. Careful consideration is given to the nature of the cowboy working tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there is no single defining characteristic of the trade, many specific elements such as herding livestock from horseback, developing horsemanship and general ranch maintenance skills all prove to be integral to identifying a formal archetype. The musical backgrounds and experiences of individual cowboy poet-songwriters are also considered, as well as the popular music culture of the American West during the period, highlighting the ubiquity of music in the lives of many working cowboys and the many situations in which they may have encountered it. Prior scholarship suggests that the nineteenth century cowboy song tradition was weak overall, including few original songs and melodies and unlikely to have been an active part of the cowboy lifestyle. I argue that not only is there a strong historical narrative surrounding this tradition, but that there are numerous examples of cowboy songs, often with unique texts and melodies, created in the fifty years between 1870 and 1920. These examples include songs published in local and regional newspapers and trade journals, songs published in collections of folk and cowboy music, and songs referenced in cowboy biographies, autobiographies, and other non-fiction literature. Far from weak or inauthentic, nineteenth and early twentieth century cowboy songs are part of a vibrant and active musical tradition that developed alongside the cattle industry boom of the 1870s -1880s and has remained an integral part of cowboy culture ever since. As it has yet to receive much direct attention by musicologists, I argue that cowboy music is its own sub-genre within popular music and is an important area for exploration. The work of Keith Negus, Fabian Holt, and David Brackett on genre in music help to inform my classification of cowboy music, although genre, style, and the entire project of musical classification is fraught with pitfalls. Negus, Holt, and Brackett’s work all point to earlier genre study, particularly in film and literary studies, and consider such ideas as “genre worlds” and “genre cultures” as well as historical, theoretical, and abstract genres. Through consideration of genre formation, genre classification, and genre’s influence on canon formation, I have endeavored to classify cowboy music within the larger web of American popular and folk music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am hopeful that this effort will provide a solid foundation from which further research can build an even more nuanced understanding of the development of early cowboy songs and the role that they have and continue to play in the expressive culture of the American West.