Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/101

 • Cowboy Songs 513 agencies of diffusion, and so have itinerant vendors and enter- tainers of all kinds. Songs learned at school and in childhood stay in the memory with especial tenacity. Country news- papers have reprinted many well-cherished pieces, later pasted into scrapbooks. Even city newspapers like the Boston Transcript and the Boston Globe have "folk exchanges" which have preserved many good texts. And now, as before the days when print was so common, song lovers copy their favourite texts into manuscript books. Pepys testified to his pleasure at hearing an actress, Mrs. Knipp, sing "her little Scotch song of Barbara Allen" — perhaps the debut of this song; and the stage star still remains a great agent in popularization. So do wandering concert troups and minor singers of many types. The once popular negro minstrels helped to universalize many pseudo-negro songs, and real negro singers, like the Jubilee singers and the Hampton Institute singers, have kept alive many songs. A striking text or a tuneful melody, given some impetus in diffusion, lingers when its history has been forgotten. After the Ball and Two Little Girls in Blue, popular stage songs of the 1890's — the first sung all over the country in the farce A Trip to China Town — are heard no longer in the cities, but they are still vigorous in village communities and on Western ranches. The name "American ballads" is now often applied to a body of cowboy, lumbermen, and negro songs, recovered, chiefly by John A. Lomax, in Texas, New Mexico, Montana, and other States. These make when brought together an interesting and picturesque display. They reflect the life, tastes, narrative themes, and metrical modes of the singers. Cowboy life is "communal," and it is vivid, full of incident, and exciting. The cowboy pieces, despite their prevailing crudity, have a certain force and breeziness. I'm a rowdy cowboy just off the stormy plains. My trade is girting saddles and pulling bridle reins. I can tip the lasso, it is with graceful ease; 1 can rope a streak of lightning, and ride it where I please. The mass of cowboy songs, so-called, including probably that just quoted, is not, however, of cowboy creation, the result of group improvisation, but rather of cowboy adoption or adap- VOL. Ill — 33