Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp

John A. Lomax gathered these verses from the working world of the American cattle range, following the collection of cowboy songs that had already made his name. The poems come from trail drives and night camps, and they carry the humor, loneliness, danger, and rough tenderness of men who spent their lives on horseback. Some are anonymous ballads passed hand to hand, others the work of named writers, and together they preserve a way of speaking and singing that was already fading when Lomax printed them in 1919. For readers drawn to the real texture of frontier life, it is a plain and honest record set down before it could be lost. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.