I've been singing cowboy songs ever since I was a small child. I received some recordings of cowboy songs as a gift when I was 5 years old. Up until this point I had not heard any music in our house except for classical music, of which my parents had a large collection of recordings. When I heard the music accompanying the singer, I did not recognize the instrument and so I asked my mother what the instrument was. My mother told me that it was a guitar. I told her that I wanted to play the guitar when I grew up. It was because of those records that I play guitar today.
Here is one called Strawberry Roan. This is one of the most famous of cowboy songs and is certainly one of the top five of this genre ever written. It is considered by most cowboy music fans to be the best horse song ever written. The words were written in 1915 by a young Nevada cowboy named Curley Fletcher after he witnessed a spectacular ride of a wild bronco on the ranch where he lived and worked. The poem was published in a local Nevada paper the following year. It was soon set to music, first being recorded about 1931. The song soon appeared in the Broadway play Green Grow the Lilacs, sung by singer/actor (and cowboy!) Tex Ritter. Soon thereafter a Hollywood movie was made from the story told in the song. I can't think of any other movie that was made using a song as the story line. Eventually the song appeared in Oklahoma! a Broadway musical. Unfortunately for Curley Fletcher, the song had been copyrighted by a couple of New York songwriters and Curley spent years in court before he finally was awarded the rights to his own song! I recorded three guitar parts to back the vocal and strove for an authentic sound and a danceable waltz groove.
If there is interest shown in this topic I will post more of my favorite songs here.