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One hundred and fifty years ago this month - April 1873 - a song was given its first performance at a house in Harlan, Kansas, which is about six miles from Gaylord, Kansas, via the miniature Statue of Liberty. The song was not written by a professional songwriter, but by a doctor named Brewster Higley VI - a fact that would be of no interest to anyone save Brewster Higley IX, Brewster Higley X or whichever other Brewster Higley is still extant, because almost instantly the song floated free of its creator, first across the American west and then to the wider English-speaking world. Nevertheless, it was Brewster Higley VI who, living in a sod dugout on the banks of Beaver Creek in Smith County, Kansas, sat down and scribbled a few verses about deer and antelope and a dearth of discouraging words:
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not cloudy all day...
That's the first known commercial version of the song, though it was not in fact the first recording. And, if you hear a few unfamiliar variations in Vernon Dalhart's 1927 rendering, we'll attend to those momentarily.
"Home On The Range" is so deeply embedded in the American consciousness it's hard to conceive that anybody ever actually put pen to paper to jot down something so ubiquitous. It feels like the kind of sentiment that emerges round a campfire under a big sky on a starry night, and in the morning the fellows ride on down the trail and take it to another state, another settlement - which is pretty much how "Home On The Range" spread across the west in the years after its creation. And, even when it turns out to be the work of an actual named individual, it seems such a perfectly distilled expression of idealized westward settlement that it comes as a surprise to discover that the fellow who wrote it was still around into the twentieth century. If Brewster Higley ever penned another lyric of any merit, posterity has not deigned to acknowledge it. But, given that everyone from Bing Crosby to Sting, Gene Autry to Andrea Bocelli, Neil Young to Alvin and the Chipmunks has recorded "Home On The Range", the Brewster M Higley VI Songbook is choice but thriving. Here is the Welsh bass-baritone Sir Bryn Terfel with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park, where discouraging words are routinely heard:
Dr Higley was born in Rutland, Ohio in 1823, the son of Mr and Mrs Brewster Higley V, and grandson of the town's founder, Brewster Higley IV. After graduating from La Porte Medical College in Indiana, he practiced as a physician, which did nothing to improve the actuarial odds of his first three wives, all of whom succumbed to various diseases and injuries (although the second had already left Higley by the time of her death). In 1866, Dr Higley wed a fourth time, taking as his bride a widow named Mercy McPherson. This marriage was not a success. The doctor was driven to drink and to Kansas. He claimed 160 acres of land in Smith County under the Homestead Act of 1862, and, living in a dugout home while building his cabin, Dr Higley found himself so moved by his new surroundings that he wrote:
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam...
He was an amateur poet but he stumbled on some oddly memorable formulations. He's big on "seldom" , which is a word seldom sung outside this song. Standard-wise, it turns up in the seldom-sung verse to Rodgers & Hart's "Where Or When":
Thought has wings
And lots of things
Are seldom what they seem...
That's how seldom "seldom" shows up in the American songbook. Yet Brewster Higley VI applies it to not only the "discouraging word" but also:
Oh, give me a gale of the Solomon vale
Where the life streams with buoyancy flow
On the banks of the Beaver where seldom if ever
Any poisonous herbage doth grow...
He wrote it, as best one can determine, in the late spring/early summer of 1872, shortly before the raising of his log cabin on Fourth of July. The small cabin still stands in Smith Center a century-and-a-half later. For a man of lyrical bent, he was "rough and uncouth in appearance", according to the local newspaper editor, W H Nelson. But, as a doctor, "no night was too dark or trail too dim to deter him from answering a demand for service." He seldom if ever mentioned his poem to his patients, and had not intended "My Western Home", as it was then called, for publication. But one day he was treating a chap for a gunshot wound and decided to recite it to him. The fellow on the receiving end, Trube Reese, liked it, and suggested he get it set to music. So Higley took his rhymes to Daniel E Kelley, who turned Higley's poem into a song. It's believed the first public performance of the new number was given in April 1873 at the home of the Harlan family in Harlan, Kansas by Lulu Harlan and the Harlan Brothers Orchestra - a violin/guitar ensemble made up of Gene Harlan, Cal Harlan and Daniel Kelley, who was Lulu Harlan's sweetheart. In December that year W H Nelson published the song in The Smith County Pioneer under the title "Oh, Give Me A Home Where The Buffalo Roam".
Why not just call it "Home On The Range"? Ah, well. Considering it was written by a doctor and a carpenter, the new song got everything right from the get-go - with one notable omission. As we heard from Vernon Dalhart, Higley's original chorus ran:
A home! A home!
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not cloudy all day...
"A home! A home!"? What happened to the range? Well, there's just one mention of the word, in the very last verse:
The air is so pure and the breezes so fine
The zephyrs so balmy and light
That I would not exchange my home here to range
Forever in azures so bright...
So that's what the word meant to Dr Higley: a verb, "to range" - in much the way he had ranged from Indiana over to Kansas after he figured he couldn't stick his fourth wife any longer. So where did the noun - "the range" - come from? At that time, thousands of homesteaders and cowboys were passing through Kansas on their way west. They heard the song, they picked it up, and somewhere en route, with Smith County receding in the rear view mirror, an anonymous cowpoke accidentally or otherwise modified a song about home to one about a "home on the range". The notion took hold. A cowboy is a rootless wanderer in a way a Kansan doctor - even the much married Brewster Higley - isn't. Such a man is at home on the range, under western skies, roaming with the ease of the buffalo.
Except that even by the early 1870s your average buffalo roamed Kansas at his peril. From a peak of perhaps thirty million, the Great Plains buffalo herd was down to a few thousand. The Kansas historian John McCool writes that it was due not just to "the eastern demand for buffalo hides and the local desire for untrammeled grazing land" but also to a determined effort to "subjugate Native American tribes by killing off their food supply". "Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated," said Philip Sheridan, commanding general of the US Army. As he saw it, buffalo hunters had done more "to settle the vexed Indian question than the army has done in the last thirty years."
If buffalo were increasingly disinclined to roam, the white man wasn't. The anonymous addition of that one monosyllable "range" enlarged Dr Higley's song. It transformed "My Western Home" from a purely Kansan song to one for the entire range country, for the great western horizon. The good doctor was looking from his dugout at his back yard - "I love these wild flowers in this bright land of ours". The cowboys who spread the song looked beyond, and over the years the references to "wild flowers" were replaced by "wild prairies". In 1908, the folklorist John A Lomax and his bulky, primitive Edison recording machine found themselves in the Buckhorn Saloon in San Antonio, Texas on the hunt for "cowboy songs". The barkeep pointed him in the direction of "a Negro singer who ran a beer saloon out beyond the Southern Pacific depot in a scrubby mesquite grove". His name was Bill Jack Curry. That day Lomax made the first known recording of "Home On The Range" in substantially the version we know it today, with "the range" in, and the local Kansas color out and replaced with a broader narrative:
The red man was pressed from this part of the west
He's likely no more to return
To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever
Their flickering campfires burn...
The Red River had supplanted the "banks of the Beaver", whereon Brewster Higley had been moved to write his original poem. Indeed, "Home On The Range" had slipped free of its creators within half-a-decade or so of its writing, and by the time gramophone records began to be made of the song in the early years of the twentieth century neither Higley nor Kelley were acknowledged as the authors. Vernon Dalhart, who made that first commercial recording, was a light operatic tenor who reinvented himself as a lugubrious hillbilly balladeer and cleaned up big time in 1920 with "The Prisoner's Song": It sold seven million copies, which was a phenomenal number back then and made it the biggest selling pop record till Bing Crosby came along with "White Christmas". Bing himself got to "Home On The Range" in 1933, by which point FDR was claiming it as his favorite song (I'm not sure I believe him):
And then the following year the whole "Home On The Range" bandwagon came juddering to a halt. In 1934, William and Mary Goodwin of Tempe, Arizona launched a half-million-dollar lawsuit against NBC and three dozen other parties claiming that "Home On The Range" was plagiarized from a composition they had written in 1905, "My Arizona Home". The Goodwins' song made no mention of Tempe or Arizona but hymned a grander horizon:
Oh, give me the steed and the gun that I need
To shoot game for my own cabin home
Then give me the camp where the fire is the lamp
And the wild Rocky Mountains to roam...
Mr and Mrs Goodwin obtained an immediate injunction - a most discouraging word for NBC, CBS (Crosby's network) and other radio stations - and "Home On The Range" vanished instantly from the airwaves. The Music Publishers Protective Association retained a New York tune detective called Samuel Moanfeldt to hunt down the origins of the song, and eventually he found himself in Kansas, on the banks of the Beaver, talking to an elderly, retired newspaper editor called W H Nelson, the man who first published the song in The Smith County Pioneer in 1873. For the first time in sixty years, Brewster Higley and Daniel Kelley were acknowledged as the authors of what by then was a beloved iconic American anthem.
Dr Higley did not live to receive his due. He died in 1911, leaving a fifth wife to add to the three he survived and the one he divorced, and expiring in Shawnee, Oklahoma, having roamed some way from his home on the banks of the Beaver. But his great lyric lives on. I received a letter the other day, as I do from time to time, making the familiar complaint that I "only write about the kind of songs Frank Sinatra sings" and ignore the older, vernacular American musical tradition. Well, I happen to think Sinatra chose pretty good songs, so why kick the habit? He recorded "Home On The Range" on March 10th 1946, in a beautiful arrangement by Axel Stordahl and in between two wonderfully tender ballads - Irving Berlin's "How Deep Is The Ocean?" and Kern and Hammerstein's "The Song Is You":
One side of me kinda wishes Sinatra had stuck with the number into his ring-a-ding-ding prime. This is the closest we get to that - from his pally Steve Lawrence:
Steve's last line is cute.
In my appreciation of Sinatra in Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, I write:
Before Sinatra, male singers aspired to the condition of Bing Crosby, who sang like he played golf: let's knock it around for a while and get to the clubhouse without breaking a sweat...
That's a wee bit unfair, especially to early Crosby, but, as evidence, I cite their respective recordings of "Home On The Range". Bing's version is about singing a song that we all already know. By comparison, and perhaps because he was coming to it straight from the intimacy and intensity of "How Deep Is The Ocean?", Sinatra's take is eerily real: Just as you believe the depth of his love in the Berlin and Kern ballads, so you believe his home really is on the range, and the deer and antelope are gamboling maybe ten yards from the microphone.
But why not? A song doesn't last 150 years if it doesn't speak to something real. "Home On The Range" simultaneously records one doctor's view of his Kansas homestead but also every American's romance with the land - the open prairie, the cloudless sky, the abundant possibilities of a small cabin on an endless frontier. Brewster Higley lived it, but for many who don't its aspirations still resonate. I always liked the way Sinatra sings his final verse - the same words (with just two amendments) that Dr Higley wrote in that sod dugout in the summer of 1872:
How often at night when the heavens are bright
With the light of the glittering stars
I stand there amazed and I ask as I gaze
Does their glory exceed that of ours?Home, Home On The Range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
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