Spanish Is the Loving Tongue (A Border Affair)

DESCRIPTION: The singer tells of his love for (and language lessons from) a Mexican girl. "But one time I had to fly For a foolish gambling fight." Though the affair may have been a mistake, he still misses her and remembers her last words to him: "Adios, mi corazon."
AUTHOR: Words: Charles Badger Clark (1883-1957)
EARLIEST DATE: 1920; apparently copyrighted 1919. Set to music by Bill Simon in 1925
KEYWORDS: love separation abandonment gambling fight foreigner
FOUND IN: US(Ro,SW)
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Thorp/Logsdon-SongsOfTheCowboys, pp. 10-11, "A Border Affair" (1 text)
Fife/Fife-CowboyAndWesternSongs 52, "Border Affair" (2 texts, 1 tune)
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, p. 404, "A Border Affair" (1 text)
Darling-NewAmericanSongster, pp. 278-279, "Spanish Is a Loving Tongue" (1 text)
Silber/Silber-FolksingersWordbook, p. 141, "Spanish Is The Loving Tongue" (1 text)
DT, SPANLOVE*
ADDITIONAL: John I. White, _Git Along, Little Dogies: Songs and Songmakers of the American West_, 1975 (page references are to the 1989 University of Illinois Press edition), pp. 126-136, "Badger Clark, Poet of Yesterday's West" (1 text, 1 tune plus discussion and a short biography of Clark)
Roud #11085
RECORDINGS:
Tex Fletcher, "The Border Affair (Mi Amor, Mi Corazon)" (Decca 5300, 1936)
Pete Seeger, "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" (on PeteSeeger30)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "South of the Border" (theme)
NOTES [179 words]: Richard W. Slatta, The Cowboy Encyclopdia, 1994 (I use the 1996 W. W. Norton paperback) says that author Charles Badger Clark, Jr. was "The origina cowboy poet 'lariat," born in Iowa and raised in South Dakota. He moved to the American Soutwest for health reasons. He worked as a cowboy in Arizona and sent letters in verse to his family at home. This was successful enough that he became a professional author. His first book, Sun and Saddle Leather, was published in 1915. He later returned to South Dakota, becoming the state's Poet Laureate in 1937.
Other songs and poems by Clark in the Index include "Bunkhouse Orchestra," "The Glory Trail (High Chin Bob)," "A Cowboy's Prayer (I)," and "Roundup Lullaby."
A version of this is printed in volume 38, number 2 of Sing Out! (1993), p. 70 credits the music to Billy Simon. This seems to be based on the statements of Katie Lee, but the information in the Sing Out! article by itself is not sufficient for me to credit Simon. But White supports the attribution to Simon, which strikes me as much better evidence. - RBW
Last updated in version 7.2
File: FCW052

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