Folk Songs from the Southern Highlands - online songbook

Southern Appalachians songs with lyrics, commentary & some sheet music.

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Ballads and Songs
I27 THE LONE PRAIRIE
See Will C. Barnes, "The Cowboy and His Songs" in The Saturday Evening Post, June 27, 1925, p. 125, with which the present fragment is nearly identical; Lomax, "Cowboy Songs andOther Frontier Ballads," p. 3; Charles J. Finger, "Sailor Chanties and Cowboy Songs," Little Blue Book, No. 301 (Haldeman-Julius Company, Girard, Kansas), p. 57; Pound, No. 78; H. Howard Thorp, "Songs of the Cowboys," p. 62; Cox, No. 54; Shearin and Combs, p. 15; Belden, No. 67; Hudson, No. 64; Franz Rickaby, "Ballads and Songs of The Shanty-Boy," p. XXVIII. Phillips Barry points out (Journal, XXII, 372, note 3) that the song is an adaptation of "The Burial at Sea" ("The Ocean Burial"). Cf. also Journal, XIV, 186; XXV, 278; XXVI, 357. The lines
"O/&, bury me out on the prairie" etc., without the negative, "not," are mixed up with another song in Bradley Kincaid's My Favorite Mountain Ballads and Old-Time Songs, p. 24, Chicago, 1928.
Obtained from Mrs. Elizabeth C. MacMillan, 1 Bary Place, Passaic, N. J., who learned the fragment in western North Carolina.
Oh, bury me out on the lone prairie
Where the coyotes howl so drearily,
Where the ratdesnakes whir and the winds blow free!
Oh, bury me out on the lone prairie.
128 THE DYING COWBOY Cf. Cox, No. 53, C, D; Pound, No. 77; Jones, p. 11. Only the following fragment could be recalled by Dr. D. S. Gage, at Montreat, North Carolina, July, 1931.
For I'm a poor cowboy And I know I've done wrong.
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