Long Come ‘Long

A new song from Cowboy Sutra unveiled

Dec 05, 2024

Dick Devoll (1877-1964) as a young cowboy near Quanah, Texas. *Cowboy Sutra* is dedicated to he and two other wonderful old-style western singers.

Today I’d like to introduce the first song on my new album, Cowboy Sutra. If you’ve been reading Loose Cannon Boost you know that over the next couple months I’ll be featuring the recording of a new song each week. Along with the recording, I’ll tell the story behind the song, then end with the lyrics.

My hope is that you will listen to the song on good speakers, ear pods or headphones. You can certainly listen on your phone but I have to admit that it makes me cringe to think that my dear old song is going to reach you on a tinny little output. I guess I’m just an uppity artiste type.

Oh hell, never mind. Listen any way you like.

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“Long, ‘Long. Long, Come Along”

These are the first words on the album. It’s an incantation of sorts that proposes we travel together to an altered place and time. This is a slow-paced world where time and shadows are both elongated. We are set to journey, but we don’t have to pack or negotiate the highways or lines at airports. We just listen and maybe sing along. I hope you don’t mind my magical thinking. I believe music can truly be magical.

“My Slickers in the Wagon….”

It was a sunny spring day in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s. I was attending a meeting at the Library of Congress with a group of state folklorists from all over the country. We had an intense day of discussions on how best to serve ordinary people in America through the folk arts. We were mostly young and idealistic, and we believed we could make the world a better place through public service. This was during a time when many in our generation were inclined to drop out, but we had decided to travel a different road. We wanted to engage. and we did this as folklorists.

At the end of the work day, I met up with two colleagues and mentors, Jim Griffith, state folklorist of Arizona, and Bess Lomax Hawes, head of the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts. We had made plans to have dinner together but as we emerged from the Thomas Jefferson Building we found a driving spring rain. None of us had thought to bring an umbrella or rain jacket and we knew that there would be plenty of competition for taxis. I dashed to the street, waved frantically, and miraculously a cab pulled over. Jim and Bess were close behind and we were all soaked to the bone. I could see the taxi driver, possibly a displaced engineer or doctor from an African country, had occupied the entire front passenger seat filled with papers and food cartons. We would all have to cram into the back.

None of us were petite. In fact, Jim was bigger than me and I weighed in somewhere around 300 pounds. Dripping wet, our clothing sticking to our bodies, we squeezed and squeezed while the taxi driver shouted at us to hurry as he was blocking traffic. It took three tries to latch the back door and then the taxi took off. We looked at one another and suddenly we were like school kids who had just mastered the impossible. We all cracked up and soon the driver joined in, the cab shaking with laughter as it careened through the downpour.

I think of that scene when I sing the verse, “My slickers in the wagon and I’m in the rain, swear by golly, never trail drive again.”

History

The song is best known by a more popular name, “The Old Chisholm Trail,” though this version never mentions that famous trail. It is one of the oldest and most beloved songs of the early cowboys. It is playful to the core. In the most common versions we hear the refrain, “Come a ti-yi-yippie-yippie-yah, yippie ya, come a ti-yi-yippie-yippie-a.” Over the years, cowboys made up their own verses as they came up the trail, small vignettes from the days following a herd of cows. It’s a horseback song, sometimes sung to call cattle in and other times to calm them down.

For Cowboy Sutra, I adapted a version from my favorite cowboy singer of all time, a fairly obscure cowboy named Dick Devoll (1877-1964) who John Lomax recorded in 1946. In his younger days, Devoll was a cowboy on the OX and XIT Ranches in Texas so his renditions are straight from the horse’s mouth. There are three songs on my album based on his singing. For me, these recordings plus his single ’78 record from an earlier time are a treasure of old-time cowboy singing.

I use Devoll’s words, but I sing them to a more common melody. I love how he extends the word "LONG" in the refrain, and I try that too, experimenting with the rhythm of the words. This feels liberating and is one of the things that I love about unaccompanied singing, which I wrote about for last week's Loose Cannon Boost. You can listen to his recording by clicking below.

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Some particulars

Like most songs on the album, the underlying instrument is the harmonium. There is something about the drone that captures something of the solitude of the endless prairie. The banjo and mandola add spice and create a feeling for the journey. For me, these instruments bring people into a hazy past where cowboys are passing time, inadvertently tuning into the universe with its infinite horizons.