Cowboy Songs
Western music was directly influenced by the folk music traditions of immigrants in the nineteenth century as they moved west. They reflected the realities of the range and ranch houses where the music originated, played a major part in combating the loneliness and boredom that characterised cowboy life and western life in general. Such songs were often accompanied on mobile instruments of guitars, fiddles, concertina and harmonica. In the nineteenth century cowboy bands developed and cowboy songs began to be collected and published from the early twentieth century with books like John Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). As cowboys were romanticised in the mid-twentieth century they became extremely popular and played a part in the development of country and western music.
Read more about this topic: Work Song
Famous quotes containing the words cowboy and/or songs:
“The lariat snaps; the cowboy rolls
His pack, and mounts and rides away.
Back to the land the cowboy goes.”
—William Jay Smith (b. 1918)
“The hills are alive with the sound of music, with songs they have sung for a thousand years.”
—Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960)