> Folk Music > Songs > The Streets of Laredo

The Streets of Laredo / The Dying Cowboy / Tom Sherman’s Barroom

[ Roud 23650 ; Laws B1 ; Henry H680 ; Ballad Index LB01 ; The Unfortunate Rake at Fire Draw Near ; DT LAREDST , LAREDS15 ; Mudcat 14919 ; trad.]

Elizabeth Stewart, Alison McMorland: Up Yon Wide and Lonely Glen

This song is one in the The Unfortunate Rake family of many related songs. In 1960, Kenneth S. Goldstein published an album on the prestigious Folkways label with 20 variants, The Unfortunate Rake: A Study in the Evolution of a Ballad, amongst them Bruce Buckley singing a version of The Cowboy’s Lament that was collected by Vance Randolph from Jim Fitzhugh of Sylamore, Arkansas, in 1919, and Harry Jackson singing The Streets of Laredo on the 1959 Folkways album The Cowboy: His Songs, Ballads and Brag Talk. Goldstein’s liner notes, available as a PDF scan at Smithsonian Global Sound, are an essential reading.

Vern Smelser sang Tom Sherman’s Barroom in a recording made by Dunford and Lee Haggerty in 1963; it was included in 2000 on the Folk-Legacy anthology Ballads and Songs of Tradition.

Hedy West sang Lee Tharin’s Bar Room (The Cowboy’s Lament) in 1966 on her Topic album of Appalachian ballads, Pretty Saro, reissued in 2011 as part of her Fellside anthology Ballads & Songs From the Appalachians. She noted:

This was widely sung from New England south to Mississippi, throughout the West and Northwest. Its most popularised version is The Streets of Laredo. It is derived from an Anglo-Irish broadside, The Unfortunate Rake current around 1790. l’ve combined the two variants that Grandma sings (Tam Sherman’s Bar Room and Jones’ Saloon) with Horace Mulkey’s Lee Tharin’s Bar Room.

Hobert Stallard of Waterloo, Ohio, sang The Dying Cowboy to Mark Wilson and Annadeene Fraley on 29 August 1973. This recording was included in 2007 on the Musical Traditions anthology of folk songs of the Upper South Meeting’s a Pleasure Volume 4. Mark Wilson noted:

Hobert provides a typical traditional text of this Americanization of The Young Sailor Cut Down in His Prime, good versions of which can be found on MT 301 and 309. Through complicated developmental processes that I don’t wholly understand, a quite specific adaptation, The Streets of Laredo, became canonized in the 1930s, along with Home on The Range and the Paul Bunyan stories (the product of an advertizing campaign, actually), as comprising a canonical set of ‘America’s folk songs and legends’, apparently in an attempt to forge a core stock of national music and myth. As a child, I vividly remember the pages of Life Magazine being filled with bright cartoons of these hypothetical heroes—indeed, my interests in traditional music began there. In contrast, younger Americans today are usually unfamiliar with most lore of this ilk, a condition clearly tied to their obliviousness with respect to America’s historical past in general. In any case, Hobert’s version is clearly prior to these canonization efforts.

Almeda Riddle of Heber Springs, Arkansas, sang Tom Sherman’s Barroom on her 1977 Minstrel anthlogy Granny Riddle’s Songs & Ballads. This track was also included in 1999 on the EFDSS anthology Root & Branch 1: A New World.

Snakefarm sang both Laredo and St. James on their 1998 album Songs From My Funeral. Anna Domino noted:

Laredo and St. James both go back to a 16^th century British street ballad (The Unfortunate Rake) about the dues of hard living. One ends up dying in the street, the other laid out in the morgue. Both songs feature a funeral.

Martin Simpson sang Tom Sherman’s Barroom on his 2024 Topic album Skydancers. (He also sang St. James’s Hospital earlier, in 2017 on his Topic album Trails & Tribulations.) He noted:

I first heard Tom Sherman’s Barroom, sung by Tracy Schwarz of New Lost City Ramblers. Dick Devall, who recorded it in the late 1920’s, was the source.

I am strangely drawn to versions of The Unfortunate Rake, a song which originally depicted a young man dying of syphilis. In the U.S., songs that refer to STDs are few and far between. Gunshot wounds are far more acceptable.

Lyrics

Hobert Stallard sings The Dying Cowboy

’Tis early one morning I rode over to Charleston
It was early one morning I rode over there.
I met a young cowboy all dressed in white linen
With sparkling blue eyes and curly brown hair.

“Once in my saddle I used to go dashing
Once in my saddle I used to ride gay.
I first took to drinking and then to card playing
I’m shot in the heart and dying today.

“Don’t write to my mommy, please do not inform her
Of the wretched condition that’s called me in.
For I know it would grieve her, the loss of her darling
Oh, could I return to my childhood again.

“Go beat the drum slowly and play the fife sadly
And play the dead march as they carry me along
Go carry me to the graveyard and throw the sod over me
For I’m a poor cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.”

Links

For much more information see the Wikipedia entry for Streets od Laredo.