Top of page

Category: Cowboy and Western Music

Three people around a microphone. One plays upright bass, one fiddle, one guitar.

Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light Concert and Interview

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light, a trio from the Boston area playing bluegrass and old time music, are the latest entry in our Homegrown Plus series, in which we include a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. You'll find it all in this post...along with a bonus song video! Singer, multi-instrumentalist, and Lennon Award-winning songwriter Rachel Sumner is a fixture of the Boston roots and Americana scene. She fronts the trio Traveling Light on vocals, guitar and banjo, with Kat Wallace on fiddle and Mike Siegel on upright bass. Together they specialize in applying their deeply rooted bluegrass know-how to new interpretations of traditional folk songs and tightly crafted original songs written by Sumner. The band has previously participated in our Archive Challenge at Folk Alliance International and contributed a song to our special Labor Day presentation in 2003. In this concert they made a special effort to play some songs that are part of the American Folklife Center archive, making this another entry in the Archive Challenge as well.

A woman holds a ukulele

Hawaiian Delegation Explores the Collections of the American Folklife Center

Posted by: Stephen Winick

On April 27, 2023, the American Folklife Center (AFC) joined four other divisions at the Library of Congress to welcome a delegation from Hawai'i. Attendees included members of two Royal Families, as well as representatives of the 'Ionali Palace in Honolulu and the Daughters of Hawai'i, an organization founded to preserve Hawaiian language, culture, and collective memory. The delegation enjoyed presentations about the Library's Hawaiian collections, and four delegates sang a beautiful version of "Lili'uokalani's Prayer," a composition written by the last monarch and Queen of Hawai'i, Lili'uokalani, who ruled from 1891 to 1893. Read about the visit and about AFC's Hawaiian collections in this guest blog post by Douglas D. Peach.

Hidden Folklorists: Harry Payne Reeves, the Mysterious Cowboy Singer Daca

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Learn about the fascinating character "Daca," a bookseller in New York who taught Alan Lomax the cowboy classic "Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle." Daca contributed ten songs and a sheaf of tall tales to the Library of Congress. He was a cowboy in the 1910s and a bookshop owner in Bohemian Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 30s, while he moonlighted by singing cowboy songs on the radio. He had a master's degree in Spanish and was an expert on European fables. He also went by at least three names (Harry Payne Reeves, David Daca, and Harry Reece). Daca was a fascinating forerunner both of Woody Guthrie, another cowboy singer who arrived in New York just as Daca left, and of Bob Dylan, a trickster who concealed his identity with aliases and gave evasive answers to interviewers. In this way, he laid the groundwork and established some of the norms for the folk scene in Greenwich Village. Read his story, hear his songs, and find out about a little known "hidden folklorist"--all in this blog post!

Half-length portrait of a young man playing guitar

Ten Thousand Cattle for Our One Thousandth Post

Posted by: Stephen Winick

It's hard to believe, but this is the 1000th published post here at Folklife Today! To celebrate, we'll talk about one of the songs on the Archive's 1000th disc. It reveals a lot about the history of the archive, the methods of Alan Lomax, and the development of a well known cowboy song. It also introduces us to "Daca," a little-known folksinger active from the 1920s through the 1940s, whom we'll profile in a later post. This track is known as AFS 1000 B2, and is Alan Lomax, then Assistant-in-Charge of the archive, singing "Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle." In the blog you can hear the song, read about where Lomax learned it, find out about its roots in "The Virginian" by novelist Owen Wister, and examine the influence of Lomax's version on the song as it was later sung by cowboys.

Cover of a folk festival program pictures a musician, a dancer, and a man on horseback with the words: Frontier Folklife Festival 1982, a free festival highlighting the music and crafts of the American West

Missouri Friends of Folk Arts Collection Comes to AFC

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The American Folklife Center is delighted to announce the acquisition of the Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts collection from Julia Olin and Barry Bergey. The collection includes concert recordings of iconic blues and old time musicians like Henry Townsend and Robert Jr. Lockwood; festival performances from the Frontier Folk Festival; fiddling traditions from Ozark and Midwestern regions; and traditional arts documentation from around the state of Missouri. Communities documented include the French speaking towns around Old Mines, Native American communities, and several Spanish speaking communities. Bergey and Olin wrote this blog post to introduce the collection to researchers at the American Folklife Center.

Postcard showing a creature made of harvest fruits, a devil, a witch, and a black cat walking in single file holding jack o'lanterns on the end of sticks.

Devil Songs for Halloween

Posted by: Stephen Winick

In his book The Folk Songs of North America, in an introduction to one of the American Folklife Center's finest songs about the Devil, Alan Lomax wrote: Early America saw the Devil as a real and living personage. Rocks in New England were scarred by his hoofprints, as he carried off maidens, screaming and howling, over the hills, or came after the men who had sold their souls to him in return for money or success. […] A mountain woman tells of the last moments of her mean old husband…’I knowed he war goin’, because all the dogs from fur and nigh come around and howled. Hit wur a dark night. But plain as day, comin’ down yon side the mountain, through the bresh so thickety a butcher knife couldn’t cut hit, I seen the Devil a-comin’. He war ridin’ a coal-black cart, drivin’ a coal-black oxen. The cart come down to the door and stopped. When it come, it come empty. But when it went away, hit had a big black ball in it that war Arzy’s soul. […] Lomax's passage serves as a fine and atmospheric introduction to our own Halloween exploration of the Devil in folksongs from the American Folklife Center archive!

Gold Mining in California. Lithograph by Currier & Ives, c1871. LC Prints and Photographs Division. Find the archival scan here.

Yuba Dam Once More!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

In a previous post, I took a look at the song “Yuba Dam,” in which a man gets in trouble with his wife and the law by answering questions honestly with the words “Yuba Dam,” only to be repeatedly misheard as saying “you be damned.” In this post, I’ll look into the deeper history of …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Yuba Dam, 2020!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Folklorists Barre Toelken and Gary Ward Stanton recorded the comic song “Yuba Dam” on August 25, 1979, among the songs and reminiscences of Kevin Shannon, a singer and storyteller with a large repertoire of songs and a deep knowledge of the history of the Irish American community in and around Butte, Montana. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, "Yuba Dam" has a new relevance. It's a tale of escalating misfortunes which leave the narrator alone, broke, and beaten up. Needless to say, I think we can all relate; it’s been a trying year. In that case, you might ask, why make it worse with a tale of woe? Well, that’s the great thing. Despite the misfortunes heaped on the shoulders of the narrator, “Yuba Dam” is a funny story. In fact, it’s just one variant of a joke that had been told in prose and verse for over 100 years when the song was recorded. In this post, we take a closer look at “Yuba Dam.”

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Hidden Folklorists Charles Finger and Nicholas Ray on the Folklife Today Podcast

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Episode Eleven of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! In this episode, John Fenn and I discuss two more hidden folklorists, writer Charles J. Finger and filmmaker Nicholas Ray. Charles J. Finger collected folklore …