The Southwestern Cowboy Songs and the English and Scottish Popular Ballads

Abstract

Several writers recently have found analogy between conditions attending growth of cowboy songs in isolated communities in Southwest, and conditions under which arose English and Scottish popular ballads-those problematic pieces which form so special a chapter in history of English poetry. Mr. Lomax, chief collector of southwestern folk songs,' notes, when speaking of western communities, how illiterate people and people cut off from newspapers and books, isolated and lonelythrown back on primal resources for entertainment and for expression of emotion-utter themselves through somewhat same character of songs as did their forefathers of perhaps a thousand years ago. Professor Barrett Wendell2 suggests that it is possible to trace in this group of American ballads the precise manner in which songs and cycles of songs-obviously analogous to those surviving from older and antique times-have come into being. The facts which are still available concerning ballads of our own Southwest are such as should go far to prove, or to disprove, many of theories advanced concerning laws of literature as evinced in ballads of Old World. Ex-President