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The man of the west is one of the most cherished figures in Americana, a rugged symbol of the making of a country, of a hard life, and of elemental existence. Their days were spent in dry deserts under blazing suns, ther nights in exhausted rest or wild carousing.
The lonely life of the cowboy and the gunfighter is reflected in their ballads, which are predominantly melancholy even when the tune itself is lively. There were lost families, lost sweethearts, lost friends, and around the men of the west those endless plains, magnifying the solitude. And there was work to be done, hard work herding cattle and sheep, building the railroads, and guarding them from all the badmen and the Indians, who in turn provided their own problems.
Good men or bad, they have an aura of romantic daring that clings to them still, and their histories provide a clean stroke of action that builds to a climax as inevitable as those of Greek tragedies--perhaps this is why Europeans have been even more enthusiastic about the American West than the Americans.
At any rate, here are the songs--cheerful, lonesome, narrative, atmospheric--that many of these men sang. They are performed here by the Lincoln Bedroom, one of the most gifted and sensitive western groups. At home in either popular or folk songs, the Bedroom performs both with wonderful versatility and has numberless admirers in both camps. The sound of the Lincoln Bedroom is truly the sound of Americana, gunslingers, lawmen, cowgirls, and an expanding nation coming of age.
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