A young cowboy lies on the ground in a Texan town, wrapped in white linen. He has been shot in the chest and he is dying. He sees a fellow cowboy passing, hails him, and tells his story: how a life of drink, gambling and women has led to his untimely death. He asks for cool water and makes requests for his funeral: a fife and drum band, a burial in the green valley.
This is “Streets of Laredo”, also known as “The Cowboy’s Lament”. It has been recorded hundreds of times, in countless incarnations, perhaps most famously by country singer Marty Robbins in 1960. In some versions, the dying man is a woman. Sometimes the cause of death is more lingering than a gunshot wound. The funeral requests sometimes stretch to jolly cowboys and pretty maidens, and there are often flowers to mask the smell of the body. Occasionally the melody is different; some versions omit the chorus entirely. These variations have made it one of the most widely discussed and dissected songs in the folk canon. It is also very sad and quite beautiful.
But where does it come from? The story is murky, but it seems to have its roots in the “broadside” ballads that circulated in England in the 19th century (so called because they were printed on broadside, or broadsheet, paper). Among these were ballads from a song family known as “The Unfortunate Lad”. In these, a young man is spotted down by the “Lock” — a syphilis hospital. He tells the song’s narrator that a woman has “disordered” him. For want of “salts and pills of white mercury”, the only known treatment for syphilis, he is doomed to die.
Now: there is nothing a folklorist likes more than a nice juicy connection, and over the years the song’s story has acquired a mystique, based around the idea that “The Unfortunate Lad” originated in 18th-century Ireland as “The Unfortunate Rake”, and that both are connected to the song “St James Infirmary”. A 1960 album on the folk label Folkways, The Unfortunate Rake, featuring 20 versions and variations, helped to popularise this theory, as did the folklorist Alan Lomax, whose father John first documented “The Cowboy’s Lament” in his 1910 book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.
But this idea has been called into question, most recently by sociologist Richard Jenkins in a 2018 lecture (“The Unfortunate Rake’s Progress”). Jenkins seems to have a point: there is little similarity, musically or lyrically, between “The Unfortunate Lad” (and its variants) and “St James Infirmary”, while “The Unfortunate Rake” appears to be an unrelated Irish jig.
Meanwhile, “The Unfortunate Lad” made his way across the Atlantic, ending up in Laredo. As popularised by singers such as Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, Burl Ives and Jim Reeves, the streets were cleaned up: references to the Lock, to “disordering” and mercury, the whorehouse (“Rosie’s”), the bar and the card house were minimised or expunged, so that in Willie Nelson’s 1968 version, beautifully sung in his woody baritone, the nature of our cowboy’s sin is a total mystery.
Female singers plumbed the darkness in another variation of the song, “When I Was a Young Girl” (also “The Unfortunate Lass”), sung to a slightly different melody. Nina Simone (turbulent, stormy), and folk singers Odetta (powerful) and Barbara Dane (stentorian) made the journey “from alehouse to jailhouse, from bar room to grave”. Sometimes the word “salivating” appears; it is thought that this is a reference to excess saliva as a symptom of the mercury “cure” (it often sounds like “salvating”, ie on the road to salvation, but this is unlikely given that the destination is hell). A variation of the song that features on the aforementioned Folkways album by a West Indian singer, Viola Penn, “Bright Summer Morning”, recorded in 1953, shows that the song travelled further afield. Voice and guitar both ring with aching clarity.
It has had a rich life in films. As “The Unfortunate Lad”, it is sung with chilling beauty by Brendan Gleeson in the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, while in last year’s Elton John biopic Rocketman, the singer and his lyricist Bernie Taupin bond over their mutual love of “Streets of Laredo”.
As has often been the case in this column, it falls to Johnny Cash to put the lid on the story. Cash had already recorded the song several times, and made a memorable TV appearance singing it with Marty Robbins in 1969. On the fourth volume of his American Recordings albums (2002), Cash delivered his final version, faltering but fabulous, with sparse guitar, piano and fiddle accompaniment. Cash’s encroaching death — he died the following year — brings poignancy to the story of a cowboy awaiting his own end.
What are your memories of ‘Streets of Laredo’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Columbia Nashville; Old Stars; Reborn recordings; Mile End; White Heat; Folkways Records; Columbia Nashville Legacy; Virgin EMI
Picture credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images