New Music 🤠🪦

The Cowboy's Lament w/ Tate Sexton

Background

It’s time for another collaborative folk song cover! With two already released and a little momentum building, I reached out to my friend Tate Sexton to see if he wanted to hop on the project and rework a classic folk song with me.

The song we chose to tackle was Roud Song #2, “The Cowboy’s Lament.” Alternate titles include “Streets of Laredo,” “The Unfortunate Rake,” and “The Trooper Cut Down in His Prime.” In the American cowboy ballad version of the song, a young cowboy has been shot and lies dying in the street. He sees a fellow cowboy walking and calls him over. He shares how his reckless life of drinking and gambling has led to his demise and makes a few specific requests for his burial.

Earlier British versions of the tune center on a young man dying of syphilis outside of a hospital for sexually-transmitted-diseases. He wishes his lover would have warned him so that he may have procured “salts and pills of white mercury” and avoided being cut down in his prime. Brendan Gleeson memorably performed this version in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. But since cowboys are more fun to sing about than sufferers of venereal disease, we opted to keep our story set on the Rio Grande.

I listened to dozens of interpretations of the song in search of inspiration. My favorites were those by Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez. In the great folk tradition, I compiled my favorite elements from multiple versions into one set of lyrics and chords to bring to Tate.

At the time we sat down to begin figuring out how to approach our arrangement, Tate was doing a lot of experimenting with glitchy synthesizers and rubber bridge guitars. He put down a few layers of each and I added bass, banjo, and flute. We quickly found ourselves in Sufjan-Stevens-maximalist-lullaby territory and that’s never a bad place to find yourself! When it came to splitting up vocal duties, we decided I would play the Good Samaritan narrator while Tate would portray the doomed, hard-living cowboy. I gave it a quick mix and master, Tate snapped a picture of a luna moth from his father’s butterfly and moth collection, and we were off to the distributor.

Go Forth and Listen!

“The Cowboy’s Lament” is up on all the popular streaming services right now. Here are links to find it on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.

You should also take some time to listen to more of Tate’s work. I’ve been a fan of his songs since before we were friends. He’s been prolific of late, putting out six releases in the last six years. My favorite of these is 2023’s Catching Up on Old TV. Find him on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc.