A classic American folk song associated with the cowboy culture of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era; “Old Chisholm Trail” is based on an English lyrical song from the 1670s. No singular person is credited as the songwriter, but it’s said to date back to the 1870s. It was first officially published in 1910 in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads by John Avery Lomax, an ethnomusicologist who traveled around America in the early 1900s capturing field recordings of traditional music.
“Old Chisholm Trail” has a characteristic that’s unique to folk music – its lyrics evolved through time and as more people heard it. Music like this that’s passed down through many different people contributes to the oral history of early American (and in the case of “Old Chisholm Trail,” more specifically Texan and Southwestern) cultures and customs.
The lyrics of the song are based around a major source of post-war income for Texas, the Chisholm Trail. Used from 1867 to 1884, it was a route out of Texas for cowboys to drive longhorn cattle up into Kansas, Missouri, and Wyoming, as well as to railroad lines that could carry the meat from the livestock to the East Coast. Longhorns were too plentiful to be a source of income in Texas, but booming cities that were popping up all over the East Coast led to more than five million cattle and a million mustangs being moved along the trail, the greatest migration of livestock in world history.
As cowboys herded thousands of cattle up the trail, they added lyrics to “Old Chisholm Trail.” Songs like this were often used to pass the time, and strong gospel and blues influences also had another function, according to longtime Dallas journalist and historian Wayne Gard. He wrote that Methodist hymns often were deployed to arrest a stampede, and this musical influence from Black culture had a calming effect on the cattle. The transcription below is an example of some of the lyrics of “Old Chisholm Trail,” but it is not inclusive of the many different versions of the song.
As noted by the Texas State Historical Association, folk music is unique because of its nature of being passed down from generation to generation, and “Texas folk music is “Texas” only because it passed through the state during the course of its transmission. Its traditional nature means that it was played or sung long before being brought to Texas.” Frank Goodwyn, who recorded the version of “Old Chisholm Trail” below, was a Historian in the early to mid-1900s who wrote a lot about early cowboy culture and the music that was born out of it.
It’s important to note that history and popular culture often center the idea of cowboys and the ‘Wild West’ as being exclusive to white Americans, but many of the cowboys who rode along the trail were Black, Tejano, and Mexican. The influence of their music can be heard in folk songs like “Old Chisholm Trail.”
Works Cited
Goodman, Glenda, and Samuel Parler. “White Noise: Historiographical Exceptionalism and the Construction of a White American Music History.” Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja, University of Michigan Press, 2021, pp. 207–38, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11374592.12.
O’Connor, Patrick Joseph. “Cowboy Blues: Early Black Music in the West.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 16, no. 2, Popular Culture Association in the South, 1994, pp. 95–103, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23413735.
Fowler, Gene. “Tunes on the Trail.” Texas Co-Op Power Magazine, Mar. 2018, www.texascooppower.com/texas-stories/history/tunes-on-the-trail.
“Old Chisholm Trail: About the Song.” Ballad of America, 30 Oct. 2019, balladofamerica.org/old-chisholm-trail/.
Lomax, John Avery. “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.” Internet Archive, New York, Sturgis & Walton Co., 1 Jan. 1970, archive.org/details/cowboysongsother00loma/page/58/mode/2up.
Fenster, Mark. “Preparing the Audience, Informing the Performers: John A. Lomax and Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.” American Music, vol. 7, no. 3, University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 260–77, https://doi.org/10.2307/3052074.
“Old Chisholm Trail.” The Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/lomaxbib000139/.
