Cowboy Life as Reflected in Cowboy Folk Songs and Poems

Abstract

The aim in this thesis is to study the folk songs and poems that the cowboys sang, and to show how cowboy life is expressed in those materials. I take into account the different versions and (where applicable) the retraceable British ancestry, concentrating on the words, rhythm, literary devices and structure. The songs analyzed are taken mostly from Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, and Thorp’s the Songs of the Cowboys.