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When a cowboy says 'women,' he means two different kinds: There's the real kind and then there's the
kind in his mind.
A song by Dan Reeder, for your edumatainment.
posted by kaibutsu
on Sep 12, 2011 -
15 comments
The
stories and pictures of the Wild West
commonly feature white men, with little notion of the diversity present in the later half of the 19th century beyond
the various regiments of "buffalo soldiers". In reality,
black cowboys made up a large portion of the cowhand population, possibly a quarter of all cowboys.
Estimations range from 5,000 to
15,000 cowboys being of African heritage. Many have been forgotten in the passing of time, but some of their stories live on. For instance, the cowboy
Nat Love, the outlaw
Cherokee Bill, and (all sorts of awesome)
"Stagecoach" Mary Fields.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 25, 2011 -
21 comments
The Original Rhinestone Cowboy. "I was laying on my bedside just as lonesome as I could be. I was by myself and so lonesome the tears just come in my eyes. I was so lonesome I prayed and said: 'Lord, give me something to make me happy' Now, you won't believe this, but the Lord told me to make an outfit. I went downtown and bought me a suit and became Rhinestone, and I ain't had one moment of lonesomeness since."
posted by Sticherbeast
on Mar 10, 2006 -
3 comments
Unless you are German you may not have heard of
Winnetou and
Old Shatterhand, characters created by
Karl May. A possible
D.I.D. sufferer, he had never set foot in America and began to write his Wild West stories whilst in jail. Popular with readers across Europe, his
books have been translated into over thirty different languages. Spaghetti Westerns partly came about because early 60s films
[test your knowledge] based on his books, inspired Italian producers to invest in
Westerns. His
life story was made part of Syberberg's trilogy in
1974.
posted by tellurian
on Aug 9, 2005 -
26 comments
The Streets of Laredo: The Cowboy's Lament was originally written as the Irish drover balled
Bard of Armaugh (or
Armagh), which later mutated into
A Handful of Laurel, about a young man dying of syphilis in a London hospital, musing back on his days in the alehouses and whorehouses. Immigrants settling in the Appalachians brought their own version,
The Unfortunate Rake, sung as early as 1790, about a young soldier dying of mercury poisoning, a result of treatment for venereal disease, who requests a military funeral - a slight but important evolution from the previous version. The current lyrics are most popularly attributed to cowboy
Frances Henry "Frank" Maynard, who copyrighted them in 1879. While various
versions of the song were popular in the US before Maynard took pen to paper and needle to wax cylinder (under such titles as
Locke Hospital,
St. James Infirmary Blues,
Tom Sherman's Bar and
Way Down in Lodorra), his version is the one with which we are most familiar today.
beat the drum slowly, play the fife lowly / sound the death march as you carry me along / cover my body in sweet-smelling posies / for I'm the young (rake, soldier, man, girl, lass, etc)
cut down in (his/her)
prime (or
and I know I've done wrong)
The song has been recorded by pretty much every country, western and folk-identified musical artist since recording music became practical, although the most popular versions must be those by
Arlo Guthrie (who once said it was "the saddest song I know," and who sings it on his album
Son of the Wind) and
Johnny Cash (who added
a few verses to his 1965 version, improving the song a bit and making it more emotionally complex).
Roger McGuinn's creative commons-licensed version is one of my personal favorites, as is Bobby Sutliff's
version.
posted by luriete
on Aug 3, 2005 -
27 comments
