Some Cowboy Songs and Ballads

It is now four or five years since my attention was called to the collection
of native American ballads from the Southwest, already begun by Professor
Lomax. At that time, he seemed hardly to appreciate their full value and
importance. To my colleague, Professor G.L. Kittredge, probably the most
eminent authority on folk-song in America, this value and importance appeared
as indubitable as it appeared to me. We heartily joined in encouraging the
work, as a real contribution both to literature and to learning. The present
volume is the first published result of these efforts.

The value and importance of the work seems to me double. One phase of it is
perhaps too highly special ever to be popular. Whoever has begun the
inexhaustibly fascinating study of popular song and literature—of the nameless
poetry which vigorously lives through the centuries—must be perplexed by the
necessarily conjectural opinions concerning its origin and development held by
various and disputing scholars. When songs were made in times and terms which
for centuries have been not living facts but facts of remote history or
tradition, it is impossible to be sure quite how they begun, and by quite what
means they sifted through the centuries into the forms at last securely
theirs, in the final rigidity of print. In this collection of American
ballads, almost if not quite uniquely, it is possible to trace the precise
manner in which songs and cycles of song—obviously analogous to those
surviving from older and antique times—have come into being. The facts which
are still available concerning the ballads of our own Southwest are such as
should go far to prove, or to disprove, many of the theories advanced
concerning the laws of literature as evinced in the ballads of the old
world...

THE DYING COWBOY

"O bury me not on the lone prairie,"
These words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of a youth who lay
On his dying bed at the close of day.

He had wailed in pain till o'er his brow
Death's shadows fast were gathering now;
He thought of his home and his loved ones nigh
As the cowboys gathered to see him die.

"O bury me not on the lone prairie
Where the wild cayotes will howl o'er me,
In a narrow grave just six by three,
O bury me not on the lone prairie.

"In fancy I listen to the well known words
Of the free, wild winds and the song of the birds;
I think of home and the cottage in the bower
And the scenes I loved in my childhood's hour.

"It matters not, I've oft been told,
Where the body lies when the heart grows cold;
Yet grant, Oh grant this wish to me,
O bury me not on the lone prairie.