A Cowboy's Last Refrain

I've often thought it was my job as a writer of children's music to give kids a baseline, so to speak, for "cliché." This song is certainly just that. It's about as cliché a western in sound, melody, and subject as you can get. This fun, 2-part song is sung from the cowboy's perspective, so your kids get to be the cowboy in the song. It's sung in western vernacular and should be stylized as such. You can accomplish this the same way we did in the studio with a few scoops and drawls. For example, in line one of the chorus ("When ya find me asleep in the saddle"), you can hear how we punched "asleep in" and then slid down at the end of "the" to set up a major scoop into "saddle." We did it again in the third line of the chorus with "bury me not in the city." It's very effective, especially if you do it with both parts 1 and 2. (Part 2 is optional, by the way. You can find rehearsal tracks for it on our web site.)

This old cowboy's lament is about seeing his lifestyle of living a simple life on the range slipping away. He doesn't care much for fame, wealth, or possessions, and certainly is not happy about such modernizations as fences and railroads. Indeed, he was seeing the onset of the industrialization of America – and didn't much care for it. This era in our history makes for some interesting discussion if you care to initiate it, particularly paralleled with the more contemporary computerization of America and the world. What are the pros and cons? The good and bad? Good cross curricular fodder.

Anyway, this musical arrangement includes such cliché western instrumentation as harmonica, dobro, banjo, and guitar. I suppose there were no string sections on the plains but they sure sound nice when they play "Home On The Range" under the last chorus. - Mike