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Rodeo

Within 15 years of Sandburg’s Songbag and eight of Stuart Hamblin’s Decca recording, the song was enough of a cowboy standard that Agnes de Mille furnished a rough transcription of it to Aaron Copland for use in his score for her new cowboy ballet, Rodeo. Copland’s presentation of the tune, which appears in the third movement, “Saturday Night Waltz,” manipulates the rhythm and melody, but the song is unmistakable. Although more art music than folk music, de Mille’s presentation and Copland’s manipulation point to some broader trends in music’s role in America’s ongoing “invention” of the West, which is really an invention of American identity.

Musicologist Beth E. Levy writes that the American West was an intersection of three frontiers: a frontier of American musical identity, a historical frontier at which American-ness itself was negotiated, and a cultural frontier “enacted by those who celebrated the West’s potential for colorful and commercial exchange.” Her book, Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West explores how this Western mythology developed in the works of early 20^th Century American classical composers.

Frontier Figures

Levy explains that classical composer Roy Harris’s work, for example, encountered a popular and critical reception that emphasized and celebrated his “whiteness,” with themes of Anglo-Saxon (or Scotch-Irish) heritage and Manifest Destiny. Harris “[imbued] his pieces on Western themes with an aura of ‘authenticity’.” He would keep the singable qualities of the source material intact, for instance, drawing from British folk themes. His sources and personal identity led music critics and the music public to cast him as “the white hope of American music.”

Copland, by contrast, disrupted the source material in interesting ways while still using it. Critics tended to tie that tendency to racial/ethnic influences as well. Levy finds other sources for Copland’s contrasting approach: “As if capitalizing on his personal distance from the aggressively heterosexual masculinity of the stereotypical western hero, Copland chose to modify and distort many of the cowboy songs he incorporated into his ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), placing them in contexts full of abrupt juxtapositions and humorous surprises.” “Hoedown,” for example, blasts you with just such a transition after the gentle, loping “I Ride an Old Paint” in “Saturday Night Waltz.” It is important to understand that gender themes are salient in the ballet itself. “The Cowgirl” is the ballet’s protagonist. In the story, she starts as a tomboyish outsider attempting to join with the cowboys. The story involves navigating certain tropes of masculinity and femininity on a path to a romantic conclusion.

Levy adds that while Copland may have been engaging heterosexuality and masculinity in conversation in Rodeo, he was avoiding other cultural intersections. “[H]is turn toward western folkore also coincided with a move away from the African American materials that had characterized much of his earlier music, suggesting that even in its musical guises America’s fascination with the West was in part a nostalgic escape from the burden of contemporary racial tensions.” As I’ve suggested, this nostalgia was itself an invention that differed from the more diverse reality of the cowboy.

We’ll ride the prairies

Someone recently asked me why I don’t write my own songs. I didn’t have a good answer, other than that I’ve rarely felt the inclination or inspiration to do so. I clearly draw enjoy not only listening to, but singing, others’ songs. Soon after this conversation, I found an answer in Sandburg’s introduction to The American Songbag, while researching this post. It resonated with me:

“Often a song is a role. The singer acts a part. He or she is a story-teller of a piece of action. Characters or atmosphere are to be delivered…. No two artists deliver a role in the same way. Yet all good artists study a song and live with it before performing it…. There is something authentic about any person’s way of giving a song which has been known, lived with and loved, for many years, by the singer.”

“I Ride an Old Paint” is one of those songs for me. I love inhabiting its roles. I’ve probably been singing it for 40 years or so. I understand the authenticity challenge that emerges in trying to perform the songs of others. One way through that challenge is to study, live with, and love the song. No one really owns it, so it is available to all in a way that singer-songwriter songs are often not.

After all these years, I still don’t know the relationship between the rider and Old Bill Jones of verse 2. The song is so spare, it leaves ample room for singers/listeners to fill in the story as they please. My childish amusement at the fate of Bill’s daughters and wife has broadened to allow for a more empathetic approach. Bill’s losses can also reflect our powerlessness before the unpredictable, sometimes tragic ways people leave us. If I wish, I can feel the song tugging at the ways I fret about my spouse’s health or my children’s safety, or my anticipation of them leaving home. Calling “I Ride an Old Paint” a murder ballad is an exaggeration. This one verse, though, encapsulates themes that often take other songs many more verses to tell. It exposes that our relationships create vulnerability. We may all find ourselves riding that prairie alone. Still we keep singing, from morning ‘til night.

The final verse gives us a “conversation with death” within a dynamic that a less inclusive age would have called “Man and Nature.” In the cowboy’s bones, ambling across the plains, I hear foreshadowed the “dust of men” composing Sandburg’s prairie in the epigraph at the start of this post–or, rather, decomposing into Sandburg’s prairie. I hear a precursor to a song like Dave Carter’s “When I Go.” Tracy Grammer, Carter’s partner, included “Old Paint” as the closing track on her first solo EP after his death, The Verdant Mile. It presents a lovely bookend to that recording’s title track, which mourns Carter’s loss.

Roger McGuinn asserts that the final verse of “I Ride an Old Paint” is “clearly a metaphor for man’s quest for eternal life.” If that’s true, it’s life dissolved and distributed in Sandburg’s dust or Carter’s uncountable showers of crimson rubies. It is a reintegration of body and soul into that real final frontier.

All in all, the song leaves a fairly wide range to roam, from the violent ridiculousness of Mrs. Jones dying in a poolroom fight to the sublimity of a prairie sunset. Take it as an old chestnut or take it as something that touches something essential about life, it’s a sure-footed companion.

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