"Living History"
Musicians offering up vintage cowboy songs

Musicians Mark Gardner and Rex Rideout will perform a collection of Western ballads, "Songs of the Cowboys." — Courtesy photo

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Charles Young
For the Independent

GALLUP — A tour featuring “living historians” and musicians Mark Gardner and Rex Rideout performing songs from the seminal collection of Western ballads, “Songs of the Cowboys” by Nathaniel Howard “Jack” Thorp, arrived in Gallup today and will conclude with a free concert at the Gallup Performing Arts Center, Friday at 7 p.m.

The New Mexico Council of the Humanities is sponsoring the statewide, eight-concert tour in conjunction with the centennial of the initial 1908 publication of Thorp’s collection, in Estancia as well as the centennial of New Mexico statehood in 2012.

“The book is such a New Mexico creation,” Gardner said. “It wasn’t published anywhere else.” Gardner calls Thorp “truly the father of cowboy music” and says he is saddened by the lack of recognition accorded Thorp, even by today’s cowboy music performers.

Of the 23 songs in the original collection, six were written by Thorp himself, including perhaps the best known, “Little Joe, The Wrangler” (1898) which tells of an inexperienced young cowpuncher, a little “Texas stray,” who runs away from an abusive stepmother to join an outfit, and gets “mashed to a pulp” in a stampede caused by a thunderstorm. Thorp composed the lyrics on a cattle drive from Chimney Lake to Higgins, Texas, and wrote them down on a paper bag.

“A lot of the cowboy songs expressed either some tragedy or a humorous episode,” Gardner explained. “Tragedy was a reflection of the Victorian times.”

Also tragic is that, curiously, Thorp never credited himself as the author of “Little Joe,” which appeared two years later in another book of cowboy songs compiled by folklorist John A. Lomax. The song went on to become a best-seller, both in recordings and sheet music of the 1920s and ’30s, but Thorp never received any royalties despite hiring a team of lawyers to press his claim.

Born into a wealthy New York family, Thorp played polo with Theodore Roosevelt, according to Gardner. He spent some summers at a Nebraska ranch, and left college to reside permanently in the West after his family’s fortunes declined.

He worked a variety of jobs including doing “everything around cattle and horses that a man can do with a branding iron and a rope.”

“Songs of the range had a special appeal to me,” Thorp once wrote. “I was a singing cowboy myself, by adoption ... and the songs I heard some cowboys sing were an authentic feature of the land and life that made it seem good ... ”

The song that caused Thorp to get serious about collecting cowboy music concerned a horse named Dodgin’ Joe. In 1889 Thorp stumbled on a camp of black cowboys near Roswell and proceeded to trade songs with them. But a cowboy named Lasses knew only two verses of “Dodgin’ Joe.” That launched Thorp, who traveled with a “piccolo” banjo, on a 19-year, 1,500-mile quest, from Texas to Utah, from ranches to saloons to medicine shows, to track down the rest of the verses and transcribe authentic cowboy songs.

Gardner and Rideout have recorded 17 songs from the original “Songs of the Cowboys,” and a later expanded version, for a CD/book package edited by Gardner and published by the Museum of New Mexico. The evocative pen & ink illustrations are by working cowboy and western artist Ronald Kil.

The musicians, whose work has been featured in TV documentaries including PBS’s “U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848,” play vintage instruments and attempt to imitate the playing styles prevalent at the time the songs were collected. Gardner plays bones, jawbone and banjo, which he began learning around the time he met Rideout while working as a ranger at Bents Old Fort National Historic Site on the Arkansas River. Rideout, who impersonated a trapper at the fort, plays the piccolo banjo, fiddle, mandolin, concertina and guitar, the latter being used sparingly as it did not become popular until the 1930s and the Gene Autry era.