(Ghost) Riders in the Sky
Steyn's Song of the Week

We are observing The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday. Our little club was born on May 6th 2017 - which means we are about to begin our eighth year, which is more than Boris Johnson's premiership can say. I'm thrilled by all the First Fortnight Founding Members who've stampeded to re-up for another season, and I hope our First Month members will want to do the same in the coming days.

~On yesterday's edition of Mark Steyn on the Town I played America's Number One record from exactly three-quarters of a century ago - May 1949:

Listeners seemed to enjoy it, and many wanted to know more about it. I don't blame them. It's extremely catchy for a song with no consistent title: "Ghost Riders in the Sky"? "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky"? "Riders in the Sky"? "Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend)"? Or maybe you prefer just plain "Ghost Riders", or "Ghostriders", or half-a-dozen other variations over the years.

But, however you label it, it's a song unlike any other. It made its appearance seventy-five years ago, and shortly thereafter versions by Peggy Lee, Bing Crosby and Burl Ives chased Vaughn Monroe up the hit parade, to be followed over the decades by Frankie Laine, Dean Martin, Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, the Doors, Blondie's Debbie Harry, the DNA Vibrators, and the German heavy metal band Die Apokalyptischen Reiter. But, with all due respect to those fine vocal artistes, the song's melodrama is made for a big-voiced baritone like Vaughn Monroe. On May 14th 1949 he and his orchestra hit Number One on the Billboard chart, and America was gripped by one of the spookiest tales ever to haunt the jukebox:

An old cowpoke went riding out one dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way
When all at once a mighty herd of red-eyed cows he saw
A-plowin' through the ragged skies and up a cloudy draw

Yippee-yi-yay, yippee-yi-yo
The ghost herd in the sky...

A ghost herd in the sky? Where did that come from? From a guy called Stan Jones - and it was, as they say on the TV movies, based on a true story. Stan was born in 1914 near Douglas, in southeastern Arizona, and by the age of twelve was working at the D Hill Ranch. "I'd been sent out to do a chore," he recalled, "so I saddled up my horse and took off. After I'd finished my work, it was beginning to blow up a storm, and, not having my poncho along, I decided to take an old path up over the mountain, which was between me and the ranch house. I was hoping to beat the rain, 'course. Well, right up on top of the ridge, I met an old, old cowpuncher, sort of a weird old fellow."

This was a leathery cuss called Cap Wells, and, without even turning his head to look at young Stan, he said, "Son, look up into the sky and you'll see the red-eyed cows of the devil's herd." And the boy looked up, and, by golly, there they were:

Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel
Their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he could feel...

It was, in fact, a meteorological effect: a peculiar cloud formation caused by the collision of hot and cold air currents. The clouds darkened, and lightning flashed, and it really did look like a ghost herd pursued by ghost riders:

A bolt of fear shot through him as he looked up in the sky
For he saw the riders comin' hard and he heard their mournful cry...

And the "bolt of fear" was certainly real. The old cowboy told the twelve-year old that if he wasn't careful he'd be joining the ghost riders, accursed to chase steers across the desert sky for all eternity. "I was scared," said Stan. "You never saw a horse or boy get off a mountain so fast in your life."

Jones grew up, left Douglas, worked in the copper mine in Jerome, Arizona, then as a logger in the Pacific Northwest, and eventually joined the National Park Service - which is when the ghost riders rode back into his life. "It was when I was stationed with the park rangers in Death Valley," he remembered. "I happened to look up into the sky. Well, sir, I saw that same kind of a cloud formation as I had way back the other time, and it sort of all came back to me. And I went inside and wrote the song":

An old cowpoke went riding out one dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way...

"Riders in the Sky" is one of those compositions whose creation we can date precisely: June 5th 1948. It was Stan Jones' thirty-fourth birthday, and with the help of his guitar he fleshed out the scene he'd first witnessed on top of the mountain twenty-two years earlier - the thundering herd of hot-breathed, red-eyed cattle, pursued by the eternally damned cowboys:

Their faces gaunt, their eyes were blurred, their shirts all soaked with sweat
They're riding hard to catch that herd but they ain't caught 'em yet
'Cause they've got to ride forever on that range up in the sky
On horses snortin' fire, as they ride on hear their cry:

Yippee-yi-yay, yippee-yi-yo
Ghost Riders In The Sky...

It's a narrative-driven song, and it wouldn't strike many musicologists as the most interesting melody in the world. In fact, it's such a generic country tune that there are all manner of other country songs - Dolly Parton's "Bargain Store", for one - that I start out singing only to morph en route into "Ghost Riders". Still, it's undeniably effective, especially on those ominous low notes at the end of each verse, followed by the "mournful cry" of the ghost riders' yippee-yi-yay. And Stan Jones wrapped it up with the warning he'd been given all those years ago by ol' Cap Wells:

The cowpokes loped on past him and he heard one call his name
If you want to save your soul from hell a-ridin' on our range
Then, cowboy, change your ways today or with us you will ride
A-trying to catch the devil's herd across these endless skies

Yippee-yi-yay, yippee-yi-yo
Ghost Riders In The Sky...

A shame that after all those great rhymes in the first stanzas ("steel"/"feel", "sweat"/"yet"), Jones falls back on two bum pairings like "name"/"range" and "ride"/"skies". Still, not bad for a couple of hours' work.

But so what? Jones was a park ranger. Fat lot of good it does you turning out hit songs in the middle of Death Valley. Stan and his wife Olive lived in a house with no TV, radio, or even telephone, so he wasn't exactly hip to the latest trends in pop music: Just making contact with the rest of the world involved a long dusty pick-up ride.

But sometimes the world comes to you. Hollywood was making a lot of westerns in those days, and no longer on the back lot. So the National Park Service decided it might be useful to have a guy they could refer the movie people to when they came out from Los Angeles to scout for the best locations. No-one knew the lie of the land like Stan Jones, so he wound up with the gig. After a long hot day's filming, there wasn't much for cast and crew to do of an evening, so it was kind of relaxing to sit under the stars round the campfire while Stan sang a few of his songs. And one night, for the boys from the John Ford picture Three Godfathers, the park ranger got out his guitar and sang a weird tale about a "ghost herd in the sky". It surely must have been especially eery under a desert moon with the flames of the fire flickering against the endless dark. When the song was over, the film crew told him he needed to get a publisher in Los Angeles.

So he went to California and pounded pavement and knocked on doors, and Burl Ives liked "Riders in the Sky":

And, when Burl's recording session was over, someone in the studio tipped off Vaughn Monroe that there was a helluva song he'd just heard and Vaughn ought to get to it right away. By Stan Jones' thirty-fifth birthday - one year to the day after writing the song - he'd had a Number One record (Monroe's) plus three other hit versions, by Ives, Bing Crosby and Peggy Lee, plus a Gene Autry movie called Riders in the Sky, in which the singing cowboy performs the song no less than three times...

Oh, and don't forget an edition of "Your Hit Parade" in which, to Stan's utter delight, Frank Sinatra roared through the song with the gusto of an authentic Hoboken cowpoke:

Of these early interpretations, I confess I'm entirely antipathetic to at least one of them. A little Burl Ives goes way too long with me. I'll never forgive him his record of "Swingin' on a Star". Instead of "if that kind of life is what you wish", Burl sings:

But then if that kind of life is what you want
You may grow up to be a fish...

How come nobody noticed that "want" doesn't rhyme with "fish"? So I have no regrets that he got beaten to the punch on "Ghost Riders". As for Peggy Lee, longtime readers know I love her, but "Ghost Riders" is a song that loses a lot of power when a woman sings it. Crosby is fine, although he takes it, as he did most things, in his stride - so that the overall effect is "Hey, there's some zombie cowboys stampeding ghost cows across the sky, but it's no big deal..." Monroe's version deservedly came out on top - at least as far as I'm concerned.

By contrast, Stan Jones never hesitated when asked to name his favorite recording: the Sons of the Pioneers, whose frontman Bob Nolan wrote our Song of the Week #97, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds":

By now, Jones knew guys like Bob Nolan, and John Ford. The cowboy actor George O'Brien introduced Jones to Ford, who liked his songs so much he signed him to write the score for The Wagon Master, with his pals the Sons of the Pioneers handling the vocals. Jones went on to compose for The Searchers and Rio Grande, in which he also appears, as the sergeant who presents the "regimental singers" (the Sons of the Pioneers) to John Wayne. For just over a decade, "Riders in the Sky" gave a park ranger from Death Valley a life he could never have dreamed of - pop hits, major movies, albums, and the TV series "Sheriff of Cochise". He was working on a novel about Queen Nefertiti when he was diagnosed with cancer. He died aged 49 in 1963, and was buried in the town cemetery back in Douglas, in his beloved Arizona.

Stan Jones never heard Duane Eddy's twang's-the-thang guitar version of "Ghost Riders", one of the earliest of the many instrumental versions, from the Ramrods to the Scorpions, from the Swedish rockers the Spotnicks to the Shadows' British hit single of the early Eighties. Jones never heard Dick Dale or the Ventures' surf "Riders". He never heard Elvis sing it, nor Johnny Cash. He never heard Milton Nascimento warble it in Portuguese, or Ned Sublette perform it as a merengue. He never heard the Doors song "Riders Of The Storm", which Robbie Krieger used to say was inspired by "Riders In The Sky". He never heard the band Riders In The Sky, nor saw the movie Ghost Rider, which includes a rock version of the song by Spiderbait. And among all these minor accolades he never saw my own tip of the hat to his great song, which came about in 2011 when Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid complained that mean-spirited Republicans were attempting to cut the federally subsidized cowboy poetry program, and took to the Senate floor to thunder that this town ain't big enough for both him and the Mean-Spirited Kid (John Boehner).

What do you need to write cowboy poetry? Words like "tumbleweed" and "chaps." Also, trochees, spondees and dactyls. Pencil and paper. Total cost: 79 cents. Maybe you and a half-dozen other cowboy poets like to book the back room at the local bar once a month for an evening of cowboy poetry and a few beers. Total cost: couple hundred bucks. Maybe folks get word, and you figure you should get a bigger room and invite the public and charge a three-dollar admission. Try as I might I couldn't figure out what there is for a distant bureaucracy thousands of miles away to subsidize. Once upon a time, the cowboy embodied the rugged individualism of the frontier. In Harry Reid's world, he embodies dependency without end. To "preserve" the "tradition," it is necessary to invert everything the tradition represents: From true grit to federally funded grit. So I decided to try my hand at non-federally-funded cowboy poetry. I'm still waiting for the grant check:

An ol' cowpoke went ridin' out one dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way
When all at once he spied a posse from the GOP
A-hangin' from that ol' mesquite his fed'ral subsidee

His pen was still a-fire and he knew how to spell "git"
But an ol' paint can't outride a trillion-dollar deficit
If only Harry Reid can head 'em off at that there pass
'Cuz he hasn't finished paying off creative-writing class

Yippee-yi-yay, yippee-yi-yo
Cow Poets On The Dole
Yippee-yi-yay, yippee-yi-yo
Cow Poets On The Dole...

With apologies to Stan Jones - because any semi-competent wordsmith can parody the universally recognized; the rare skill is creating something that instantly recognizable in the first place. Of course, in some ways "Riders In The Sky" is merely a western variant of the old European myth of the Wilde Jagd - the "wild hunt" in which, on stormy nights, various Norse gods, local kings, legendary warriors, or just a bunch of no-name lost souls ride across the dark clouds lit up by lightning flashes. Likewise, the first Pirates Of The Caribbean would have rung a few bells with Stan Jones. But no one has ever taken the legend and distilled it so perfectly in music - now and for all time:

'Cause they've got to ride forever on that range up in the sky
On horses snortin' fire, as they ride on hear their cry:

Yippee-yi-yay, yippee-yi-yo
Ghost Riders In The Sky...

Oh, okay. One more - from Count Dracula, Scaramanga the Man with the Golden Gun, Count Dooku in Star Wars, Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and the dentist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Did you know Sir Christopher Lee could a-plow up a cloudy draw with the best of them?

Stan Jones died too young. No soul in torment cursed to ride the storm-tossed skies, but a man at rest in the town of his birth, whose gravestone bears the words of his song "Resurrectus":

I'll see him in the sunrise
And just as day is done
No more to walk in darkness
For I know now my cares are none.

~Many of Steyn's most popular Song of the Week essays are collected together in his book A Song For The Season, personally autographed copies of which are available from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the special promo code at checkout to enjoy the special Steyn Club member discount. As we always say, club membership isn't for everybody, but it helps keep all our content out there for everybody, in print, audio, video, on everything from civilisational collapse to our Sunday song selections. And we're proud to say that this site now offers more free content than ever before.

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