Popular Music in the West

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Popular Music in the West

Fiddles and Dances. In the late fall of 1804, as Meri-wether Lewis and William Clark reached the Mandans and Minitaris in what is now North Dakota, the expedition paused to build winter quarters. While passing the winter months, the men of the expedition traded with the Indians, hunted, gathered wood, and repaired their equipment. They also spent many evenings enjoying music. On Christmas Day 1804 Clark’s journal records that one of the rooms of the winter fort was “prepared for dancing, which was kept up until 8 p.m.” The explorers celebrated New Year’s Day with dancing, joined by the Mandans and accompanied by fiddles and tambourines. Indeed, Pierre Cruzatte, a fiddler and trader on the Missouri River, joined the expedition for the sole purpose of providing entertainment. According to the journals, the men of the expedition, no matter how fatigued, always enjoyed square dancing to Cruzatte’s fiddle.

Lonesome Tunes. Music was an important aspect of the Western experience; from the Mountain Men’s Rendezvous to military posts to the gold camps, singing and dancing were popular pastimes. Music was often supplied by fiddles, tambourines, accordions, banjos, and harmonicas, instruments small enough to be transported across the westward trails. Some of the songs were “lonesome tunes,” emphasizing isolation and homes left behind. Other songs recalled the spirit of the tall tale, exaggerating and laughing at the dangers of the wilderness and parodying the foibles of greenhorns and conventional culture. Some campfires resonated with both kinds of music. One traveler along the Oregon Trail, recalling evening camp life, contrasted the improvised dances accompanied by the “lively music” of the violin to the “mellow and melancholy notes” of the flute, which seemed “a lament for the past rather than a hope for the future.” G. W. Thissell, who traveled to California from Iowa, recorded in his diary the pleasures of sitting around the campfire, telling stories, and singing songs, including Stephen Foster’s popular “Oh! Susanna”: “It rained all night, the day I left, / The weather, it was dry. / The sun so hot, I froze to death / Susanna, don’t you cry. / O Susanna, / Don’t you cry for me, / I’m going to California / Some gold dust to see.” Emigrants brought other popular songs along with them on the Oregon Trail, including Daniel Decatur Emmett’s “Old Dan Tucker” (1843), “My Old Sally” (1843), “The Blue Tail Fly” and “Jimmy Crack Corn” (1846); Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” (sometimes called “Swanee River”); and M. A. Richter’s “The California Pioneers.” Popular folk songs included “Skip to My Lou,” “Swing on the Corner,” “Old Joe Clark,” and “Sourwood Mountains.” Many of the melodies were borrowed from Irish reels or Eastern popular songs but were transformed by frontier fiddlers, becoming more rhythmic, energetic, and idiosyncratic.

Songs of the Gold Camps. Music was also often heard around the camp fires of Forty-Niners. Some songs recalled the pleasures and comforts of their distant homes, such as “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” which one Eastern emigrant called an “especial favorite” of the miners: “party after party joined in the chorus, and the melody would come pealing round odd corners and from distant tents, in heartfelt strains.” Miners rewrote or parodied familiar tunes, such as John Nichols’s “Oh, California” (1848), a parody of Foster’s “Oh! Susanna.” Another boomtown songwriter borrowed the tune of “New York Gals” to warn greenhorns about “Hangtown Gals,” who were, according to the song, “plump and rosy, / Hair in ringlets mighty cozy; / Painted cheeks and gassy bonnets” but “Touch them and they’ll sting like hornets.” The first gold rush song actually written in California is believed to be David G. Robinson’s “Seeing the Elephant” (1850), a song documenting the high hopes and disappointments of life among the miners. Newpaper editor George W. Kendall, in his Santa Fe Expedition (1844), defined “seeing the elephant” as “when a man is disappointed in anything he undertakes, when he has seen enough, when he gets sick and tired of any job he may have set himself about, he has seen the elephant.” The phrase became a popular one to describe the harsh realities of camp life, as Robinson’s song makes clear: “When the elephant I had seen, / I’m damned if I thought I was green; / And others say, both night and morn, / They saw him coming round the Horn.” Music was such a popular pastime among the miners that between 1852 and 1861 twelve songbooks, or “songsters,” were published and sold around the camps.