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From Dodge City to Laredo

We may actually know who is responsible for sending the “Unfortunate Rake” down this particular Western trail, but the “folk process” has enlisted many contributors and arrangers, all honing the poetry and the themes. In the process, historical and geographic accuracy do battle with poetic license. “Tom Sherman’s Barroom” may make a little more sense of the story and be truer to the original, but “Streets of Laredo” sure sounds prettier.

Frank H. Maynard, who worked as a cowboy in southern Kansas in the 1870s, claimed he wrote the song in 1876. Maynard did not publish his version until 1911. Entitled “The Dying Cowboy,” it appears in his Rhymes of the Range and Trail. This publication appeared shortly after a version of the song under a different title appeared in John A. Lomax’s seminal Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, which was published in 1910. I don’t know of any audio recording of Maynard singing the song, but you can read his lyrics here.

Maynard’s memoir of his cowboy days was later recovered and published by literature scholar Jim Hoy. Researchers differ on whether Maynard sufficiently substantiates his claim to authorship of “The Dying Cowboy.” Richard Polenberg, in his introduction to Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales That Inspired Stagolee, John Henry, and Other Traditional American Folk Songs, relates the Maynard account as fact. Robert B. Waltz, at the Traditional Ballad Index finds the Maynard claim plausible, but the evidence for it insufficient to rule definitively. Hoy acknowledges that many hands have taken a turn tweaking the lyrics of this Western “Rake,” and that it’s possible the song developed from multiple sources.

Kenneth Goldstein passed away before Maynard’s work was rediscovered and published by Hoy, couldn’t weigh in on the question of Maynard’s authorship. His speculation on its source may not have been too far off, though. He writes, “It appears impossible at this late date to trace the line of descent of Cowboy variants; we can only guess that some frontiersman brought a version of either the older ‘Rake’ ballad, or its sister mutation, ‘The Bad Girl’s Lament’, to the West where it was readily adapted to the frontier situation.” In tracing the “evolution” of the ballad, Goldstein views the Cowboy variant as an example of a “mutational” change. “Mutational changes are caused by more creative forces–such as the desire for more dramatic effects, tendencies towards localization and rationalization of old motifs and settings, and invention of new story matter.”

As Jim Hoy notes, Maynard included four of his poems in his 1888 memoir, but “The Dying Cowboy” was not one of them, nor does he mention the song in it. Maynard told the story much later, in 1924, to Professor Elmo Scott Watson. Maynard explained that “The Dying Girl’s Lament” was popular among his fellow cowboys. He put new words to the tune, making the protagonist a “dying ranger,” a more precise term in that day than “cowboy.”

John Avery Lomax, c 1930-1950, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

In addition to “ranger,” the inclusion of “Tom Sherman’s Barroom” in Maynard’s lyrics may be a clue in assessing his song’s authenticity. In the introduction to his 1910 book, John Lomax describes loneliness and hardship on the trail as forces that required and bred a personal discipline and stoicism in cowboys. Once in town, though, these would often fall away once the cattle were brought in and the cowboy got paid. Cattle drives brought herds from ranges in Texas up to Kansas and towns like Dodge City, from which they would be shipped east. Maynard’s Zach Potter story above is therefore fitting. Potter was shot over a game of cards in eastern Kansas. Maynard’s version is not set in Texas, but instead “Tom Sherman’s Barroom,” a real place in Dodge City, Kansas.

Maynard told Watson: “After I had finished the new words to the song I sang it to the boys in the outfit. They liked it and began singing it. It became popular with the boys in other outfits who heard it after we had taken our herd to market in Wichita the next spring, and from that time on I heard it sung everywhere on the range and trail.”

The version collected and published by Lomax was entitled “The Cowboy’s Lament.” It takes place in the streets of Laredo. Laredo’s status as a border town with Mexico may have also evoked wild living.  At least two possibilities present themselves here. Two cowboy versions of the “Rake” may have merged or overlapped, or an ingenious interpreter felt like “Streets of Laredo” fit the sound or the story better. It clearly found an enthusiastic audience and eager interpreters.

“I’m shot through the breast and I know I must die”

Maynard’s memoir is a fascinating read. It puts the song’s early popularity among the “boys in other outfits” in a helpful context, particularly when coupled with its quick rise as a stalwart of the “(Wild) Western canon” of folk song by the time of Lomax and Sandburg. Although it is now often a nostalgia piece, with an eye looking back to the Old West, its early popularity suggests the song may have functioned differently at the time in the voices of singers and in the ears of listeners.

Maynard writes in a straightforward, sometimes compressed style, with occasional flourishes of language. His stories involve hardship, challenge, a significant amount of violence, and more than a little moral ambiguity. Reading through it can feel like watching “Game of Thrones” on fast forward, with cowboys, outlaws, and others falling to acts of sudden violence. Maynard’s story also presents conflicts between honor and friendship on one side, and greed and duplicity on the other, in the relatively lawless terrain of the West. Crimes may go unpunished, or they may sometimes be punished without benefit of judge, jury, or even trial. Maynard tells one story of a cowboy hanged for murder over the rafter of an abandoned barn by an impromptu judge and jury of his fellow cattle-drivers.

‘The Misdeal’ c. 1897, by Frederic Remington (1861-1909)

“Streets of Laredo,” therefore, is gentler than the lived experience of many of the people who popularized it in its early days. It focuses on the hero’s regrets about his moral slide and his desire for a burial with honor. It does not focus on the conflict and the violence. In other words, it pursues the homiletic purpose of the other “Rake” ballads, not a cathartic one. Unlike many contemporary murder ballads and other types of crime art, it does not shock or horrify.

Furthermore, that “we all loved our comrade although he’d done wrong” also captures the significant moral ambiguities of the cowboy’s life on the range. Maynard’s stories tell of personal conflicts among comrades spinning into deadly violence, and of making peace with enemies or truces with outlaws out of a need to survive. That “we all loved our comrade although he’d done wrong” takes on a different inflection among men living on the boundaries of lawlessness who occasionally need to depend on one another for survival.

In these ways, the “Rake” finds a particular home on the edges of civilization. The frontier context creates that opportunity for “mutational change.” When I initially planned to write this song up, I thought my story was going to be about the bowdlerization involved in removing the syphilis angle from the song. I’ve come to see, though, that it is less prudishness driving this move than the song’s suitability to a place of great violence and a significant amount of moral fluidity.

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