Hoyle Osborne
Ragtime Cowboy Joe • Notes 3
Ragtime Cowboy Joe • Notes 3
Red River Valley is a Canadian song from around the 1860s, but Texans have been singing it about their own Red River since at least the 1880s. Home on the Range was composed by a couple of Kansans in 1873, and became widely known after it appeared in John Lomax’s book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, in 1910.
Sobre las Olas, by the Mexican composer Juventino Rosas, is still played as the bride’s waltz at weddings in northern New Mexico. Another Mexican favorite, well-known in the Southwest, is the polka, La Jesusita en Chihuahua.
By the dawn of the Twentieth Century, the music-publishing industry was in full swing, coinciding with the emergence of ragtime into the popular mainstream. Red Wing and Silver Bell are examples of the brief fad for Indian Intermezzos – two-steps with preposterous lyrics, supposedly on Native American themes. The words are rarely heard, but Red Wing and Silver Bell are still played by Western fiddlers. Another two-step, Dixie Darlings, was adapted and recorded by the pioneer country music group, The Original Carter Family.
