Railroad Corral, The

DESCRIPTION: "We're up in the morning ere breaking of day, The chuck wagon's busy, the flapjack's in play." The singer describes the hot, dusty, dirty work of the cowboy, and the long days and long trails. He rejoices to reach the end of the trip
AUTHOR: Joseph Mills Hanson (1876-)
EARLIEST DATE: 1904 (Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly); listed as a traditional song by Lomax in 1910
KEYWORDS: cowboy travel work food
FOUND IN: US
REFERENCES (11 citations):
Thorp/Logsdon-SongsOfTheCowboys, pp. 132-134, "The Railroad Coral" (1 text)
Fife/Fife-CowboyAndWesternSongs 77, "The Railroad Corral" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lomax-FolkSongsOfNorthAmerica 185, "The Railroad Corral" (1 text, 1 tune)
Silber/Silber-FolksingersWordbook, p. 113, "The Railroad Corral" (1 text)
Tinsley-HeWasSinginThisSong, pp. 28-31, "The Railroad Corral" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, pp. 376-377, "The Railroad Corral" (1 text, 1 tune)
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, p. 144, "Railroad Corral" (notes only)
Tobitt-TheDittyBag, p. 64, "The Railroad Corral" (1 text, 1 tune)
ChansonsDeNotreChalet, p. 61, "Railroad Corral" (1 text plus a partial translation into Swedish, 1 tune)
DT, RRCORRAL*
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. 38-45, "Last Day with the Longhorns" (1 text, plus extensive discussion about how the song became popular)
Roud #4636
RECORDINGS:
Bill Bender (The Happy Cowboy), "The Railroad Corral" (Varsity 5148, n.d.; rec. 1939)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Irish Washerwoman" (tune)
SAME TUNE:
The Irish Washerwoman (no Index entry, since it has no lyrics; this is the cross-reference entry for this melody)
Botany Bay Courtship (The Currency Lasses) (File: FaE068)
Corporal Casey (File: OCon021)
The Hold-Up (File: RDBW394)
Irishman's Shanty (File: GrMa109)
McTavish is Dead (File: PHCFS122)
Old Binnie (File: EM264)
Starving to Death on a Government Claim (The Lane County Bachelor) (File: R186)
Gold's a Wonderful Thing (File: Colq034)
Things You Don't Often See ("There are strange sights in Auckland exciting surprise") (by Charles R. Thatcher) (Hoskins-GoldfieldBalladeer-LifeAndTimes-Charles-R-Thatcher, p. 185)
The Irishman's Epistle to the Officers & Troops at Boston ("By my faith but I think ye're all makers of bulls") (Rabson-SongbookOfTheAmericanRevolution, pp. 30-31)
NOTES [55 words]: The ChansonsDeNotreChalet version is just strange. The verses come from Lomax; no mystery there. But it's described as a "Danish Sea Song by Seedorff Pedersen"; "Adapted to Danish tune and original chorus added by Julian H. Solomon 1922." Thus the camp version is basically a composed song that borrows some words from Lomax. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: LoF185

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