Where the West Commences - Don't Fence Me In

By Jim Poulton

Fence and beaverslide in the Big Hole Valley, Montana. Credit: My-West.com ©

Originally written in 1934, Don’t Fence Me In languished in song limbo for a full ten years before it was heard by much of anyone – except for Cole Porter and maybe his mother. Porter had written the song for a film - Adios Argentina - that was never released. He’d based the lyrics on a poem by a Montana writer named Robert Fletcher. Fletcher and the producer of Adios Argentina were friends, and when Porter was asked to write a cowboy song about the west (you can imagine Porter’s surprise – he’d never written a cowboy song before), the producer suggested he buy the rights to Fletcher’s poem and use it for some of the lyrics.

Porter borrowed a number of lines from Fletcher, including ‘Give me land, lots of land,’ ‘on my cayuse’ (I had to look it up too – a cayuse is a North American horse, wild or tame, that is small, stocky, speedy and has incredible endurance – it’s named for the Cayuse people of eastern Washington and Oregon), ‘straddle my old saddle,’ and ‘where the West commences.’

Cayuse Horse. Credit: Indianscoutoz

The song was finally heard when it was featured in Hollywood Canteen, a musical filmed in 1944 to entertain the troops in World War II, starring Roy Rogers and his horse. After Hollywood Canteen, Don’t Fence Me In went on to sell more than a million copies of sheet music – no small potatoes in 1944. Accounts differ as to what happened next. Either Porter realized Fletcher hadn’t received any credit or income from the song and decided to assign him a portion of the royalties, or Fletcher hired attorneys who negotiated his share of the proceeds. Either way, Don’t Fence Me In has become one of the most popular western songs of all time. Here are three very different versions – first by Roy Rogers, then by David Byrne and Willie Nelson. (You’ll be interested to know that James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald and Nokia (for a commercial) also did versions!)

Cole Porter. Credit: Ravennafestival.org

Cool Water – The Sons of the Pioneers

by Jim Poulton

My wife and I grew up in different states – she in a small town in Montana, and I in a middle class subdivision of Salt Lake City. But we each had a favorite album that we listened to over and over as children. And we discovered a little while ago that it was the same album: Cool Water by The Sons of the Pioneers.

Left to right: Tim Spencer, Bob Nolan, Hugh Farr, Roy Rogers (Gus Mack, announcer). Photo courtesy of bobnolan-sop.net

The Sons of the Pioneers have left a long (and dusty) trail in the history of cowboy music. Starting in 1934, their original members included Tim Spencer, Bob Nolan, Hugh Farr and Roy Rogers (of Dale Evans fame). They were about as famous as you could get in those days:  their music appeared in over 90 western films, and they are the authors of some of the most iconic cowboy songs that have ever been written. Bob Nolan, the main songwriter in the group, wrote Cool Water and Tumbling Tumbleweeds, two songs that have defined the west as much as cattle and rattlesnakes.

Bob Nolan. Photo courtesy of bobnolan-sop.net

Here is Cool Water, from an original 78rpm Gramophone:

And here’s Tumbling Tumbleweeds:

You can also listen to dozens of different versions of each song by following these links: Cool Water;  Tumbling Tumbleweeds.

As a group, The Sons of the Pioneers are still around today. They’ve won about every award possible in the country/cowboy music genre, including the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Western Music Association Hall of Fame, the Smithsonian Institute’s ‘National Treasure’ Designation, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, and the Golden Boot Award. They even have their own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. More than that, though, they are the group that was instrumental in putting cowboy music on the map. Before them, there really wasn’t much of a genre called cowboy music. After them, cowboy music was ridin’ easy in the saddle. As Doug Green of Riders in the Sky put it: ‘Any of us who sing Western music, it all goes back to the Pioneers.’ 

Photo courtesy of bobnolan-sop.net

Actually, people were paying attention to cowboy songs prior to the appearance of The Sons of the Pioneers. In 1921, N. Howard (‘Jack’) Thorp collected and published a collection of cowboy poems and songs. The volume is now in the public domain, and you can download it for free here. Or you can purchase a more recent edition here.

Here are the first two stanzas of The Cowboy’s Life, heard by Thorp ‘at a little round-up at Seven Lakes, New Mexico, by a puncher named Spence’:

The bawl of a steer
To a cowboy’s ear
Is music of sweetest strain;
And the yelping notes
Of the gray coyotes
To him are a glad refrain.

And his jolly songs
Speed him along
As he thinks of the little gal
With golden hair
Who is waiting there
At the bars of the home corral.