Carl T. Sprague Cowtrails, Longhorns And Tight Saddles

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1-CD with 38-page booklet, 24 tracks, playing time 75:01 minutes. - Carl T.... more

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Carl T. Sprague: Cowtrails, Longhorns And Tight Saddles

1-CD with 38-page booklet, 24 tracks, playing time 75:01 minutes. -

Carl T. Sprague Cowtrails, Longhorns, And Tight Saddles - Cowboy Songs 1925 - 1929

On three successive days in August of 1925, a thirty year-old athletic trainer from the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (Texas A&M) named Carl T. 'Doc' Sprague stepped up to a studio microphone at the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey and recorded ten songs learned on cattle drives in South Texas. Soon one of the songs, When The Work's All Done This Fall, about a cowboy killed during a night stampede would explode onto the American recorded music scene. As a result, the image of the singing cowboy was permanently established in American folk culture.

Western music collector and historian, Fred Hoeptner asserted in his 1965 notes to 'Authentic Cowboys And Their Western Folksongs' (RCA Victor LPV 522) that the recording sold 'over 900,000' copies in the intervening years. Though this figure has yet to be verified there is no question that the song was a nationwide hit.

Sprague had learned When The Work's All Done This Fall and many other cowboy songs as a young man while working with an uncle on cattle drives prior to enrolling at Texas A&M. In a 1970 interview with the late cowboy singer and folklorist, John I. White, Sprague said that he had always been interested in music, having had a band in college and a musical radio show on the campus experimental station at A&M. He was inspired to seek an audition with Victor after hearing another Texan, Vernon Dalhart's recording of The Prisoner's Song. With the arrangements of the cowboy songs provided by a local music teacher and girlfriend, Lura Bess Mayo, Sprague traveled to Camden and history was made.

Texans showing up and asking to be recorded was not new to the people at Victor. Three summers earlier in June 1922, fiddler A.C. 'Eck' Robertson of Amarillo and his friend and fiddling contest rival, Henry Gilliland of Altus, Oklahoma, did that very same thing, apparently on a lark, after traveling to Virginia to play at a Confederate veterans’ reunion. Sprague's arrival in Camden, which was prearranged, was less outrageous than Robertson and Gilliland who were dressed in a cowboy outfit and a Confederate Army uniform respectively, but his songs of cowboy life were no less foreign to the Camden executives. Few if any Victor executives were aware of the vast amount of cowboy material that existed.

In its adolescence by the 1920s, the American recording industry was well acquainted with jazz, opera, and the antecedents of modern country music, then referred to as mountain, hillbilly, or old time music. Poems and songs by and about the cowboy life had not entered the national consciousness. Folklorists such as Nathan Howard 'Jack' Thorpe and John A. Lomax had collected cowboy songs and published them in the early part of the Twentieth Century but the idea of commercial recordings of these songs being popular with large numbers of people was as yet unproven.

In 1919 Bentley Ball recorded The Dying Cowboy and Jesse James for Columbia. In November 1924 Charles Nabell recorded several cowboy songs for the Okeh label. Ball and Nabell were not exclusively cowboy singers nor is there any evidence that they had worked as cowboys. Carl Sprague was both and he had the good fortune to show up in the right place, with the right songs at the right time.

Article properties: Carl T. Sprague: Cowtrails, Longhorns And Tight Saddles

Interpret: Carl T. Sprague
Album titlle: Cowtrails, Longhorns And Tight Saddles
Label Bear Family Records
Preiscode AH
Artikelart CD
EAN: 4000127159793
weight in Kg 0.115

Sprague, Carl T. - Cowtrails, Longhorns And Tight Saddles CD 1
01	When The Work's All Done This Fall	Carl T. Sprague
02	Kisses	Carl T. Sprague
03	Bad Companions	Carl T. Sprague
04	Following The Cowtrail	Carl T. Sprague
05	Cow Boy Love Song	Carl T. Sprague
06	The Club Meeting	Carl T. Sprague
07	If Your Saddle Is Good And Tight	Carl T. Sprague
08	The Gambler	Carl T. Sprague
09	O Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie (The...)	Carl T. Sprague
10	The Cowboy's Dream	Carl T. Sprague
11	Here's To The Texas Ranger	Carl T. Sprague
12	The Boston Burglar	Carl T. Sprague
13	Rounded Up In Glory	Carl T. Sprague
14	Last Great Round Up	Carl T. Sprague
15	Cowman's Prayer	Carl T. Sprague
16	The Cowboy	Carl T. Sprague
17	Utah Carrol	Carl T. Sprague
18	The Two Soldiers	Carl T. Sprague
19	The Wayward Daughter	Carl T. Sprague
20	The Prisoner's Meditation	Carl T. Sprague
21	The Cowboy's Meditation	Carl T. Sprague
22	The Last Long Horn	Carl T. Sprague
23	The Cowboy At Church	Carl T. Sprague
24	The Mormon Cowboy	Carl T. Sprague