This bonus episode of Cowboy Crosroads features a segment that Andy Hedges narrated for the American Songcatcher podcast about the first cowboy song collector Jack Thorp.
In March 1889, Jack Thorp, a born-to-privilege Easterner who had grown into a leather-tough, saddle-wise trail hand, decided to track down the words to songs about cowboy life from cowboys singing in cow camps, at chuck wagons and line camps, in saloons—anywhere Thorp could find them, mostly in New Mexico and Texas. His course proved crucial to the evolution of cowboy culture and the publication of his Songs of the Cowboys, the first collection of folk songs in America in 1908.
Find out more about the American Songcatcher podcast at www.americansongcatcher.com