Wanderers

Literature, Culture and the Open Road

David Brown Morris

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000521399
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism

This book introduces the idea and experience of wandering, as reflected in cultural texts from popular songs to philosophical analysis, providing both a fascinating informal history and a necessary vantage point for understanding - in our era - the emergence of new wanderers.

Wanderers offers a fast-paced, wide-ranging, and compelling introduction to this significant and recurrent theme in literary history. David Brown Morris argues that wandering, as a primal and recurrent human experience, is basic to the understanding of certain literary texts. In turn, certain prominent literary and cultural texts (from Paradise Lost to pop songs, from Wordsworth to the blues, from the Wandering Jew to the film Nomadland ) demonstrate how representations of wandering have changed across cultures, times, and genres. Wanderers provides an initial overview necessary to grasp the importance of wandering both as a perennial human experience and as a changing historical event, including contemporary forms such as homelessness and climate migration that make urgent claims upon us.

Wanderers takes you on a thoroughly enjoyable and informative stroll through a significant concept that will be of interest to those studying or researching literature, cultural studies, and philosophy.

1Don’t fence me in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003255307-1

I tramp a perpetual journey….

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

The mythical Wild West cowboy is a modest American gift to world culture and (not to be taken lightly) comes with a horse.

Henry James in his 1879 study of Nathaniel Hawthorne picks up on Hawthorne’s famous lament about the things absent from American life and provides his own massive addendum:

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class….

James continues his running list of national absences (so detrimental, in his telling, to the formation of an early American literature) until he finally concludes with a minor concession. “The American,” he allows, “knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say.”¹

What is the redeeming American secret or joke? What specific feature did James see as offsetting the multiple absences in American life? It is the “national gift” of humor.

It is not surprising that James, cosmopolitan to the core, does not mention cowboys. He would take it for granted that fictional cowboy stories—which get their start in so-called penny dreadfuls and dime novels popular from the 1850s—do not count as literature. From a literary point of view, cowboys are not serious, belonging to low-culture pulp magazines, and it would hardly impress James that Karl May (among the bestselling German novelists of all time) in 1875 introduces the fictional Apache warrior Winnetou in the debut novel of his immensely popular Winnetou Trilogy. If cowboys are too trivial to offer James even a token contribution to the hollowed-out national scene, it might be possible, in retrospect, to slip them in through the secret Jamesian loophole of humor. Few figures in American culture are more unwittingly self-parodic or joke worthy than the earnest, comical twentieth-century media confection known as the singing cowboy.

The singing cowboy has almost nothing in common with western ranch hands, who, in the tradition of the Mexican vaquero, ride horses, tend cattle, and mend fences. Their lives mostly disappear into the fictive stereotypes created by nineteenth-century urban writers in the northeast. Hollywood film westerns appear in the 1920s and help spawn the later 1950s cowboy series on television. Classic figures such as Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid—or the Lone Ranger and Tonto—ride on through changing genres and periods, but many of the popular figures are cowboys in name only. “Tex” Ritter (first name Woodward) attends Northwestern Law School. John Wayne, born Marion Morrison in Iowa, grows up in Southern California and attends USC on a football scholarship before the LA film industry transforms him into a laconic cowboy legend.

Wandering, as a byproduct of the wide-open spaces, is a distinctive attribute of westerns as a genre, but no figure does more to solidify the link among wranglers, wandering, and American culture than the once popular and weirdly fascinating cowboy who sings.

The singing cowboy, although manufactured by the film, radio, and recording industries starting in the 1930s, offered something that shoot-’em-up western heroes could not supply. It is not well known that, for example, John Wayne (before his monosyllabic stardom) was an early film singing cowboy, although he couldn’t carry a tune and his songs were always dubbed.² Melodious, plaintive male voices invoking the lonely, wide-open spaces held a strong appeal to Americans feeling confined by the Great Depression. Radio listeners enjoyed the western harmonies as carrying an escapist, politics-free pleasure amid the anxieties of rising chaos abroad. The three all-time top 100 western songs—as voted in 2010 by the Western Writers of America—all appear in the early 1930s: “Home on the Range” (1933), “Don’t Fence Me In” (1934), and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” (1935).

Wandering is a recurrent motif in the favorite cowboy songs, helped along by mostly stay-at-home stars. Bing Crosby in 1933 first records “Home on the Range.” Two years later, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” tumbles onto the scene in a 1935 film featuring one of the major singing cowboys and box-office draws, Gene Autry. Audiences didn’t need to know that tumbleweed arrived in the west mixed with flax seed that immigrant Ukrainian farmers imported to South Dakota. Autry, whose résumé included a stint as an actual rodeo rider, offered all the truths listeners needed: tumbleweeds tumble and cowboys drift. Both affirm that a life of wandering is still possible, if only in a mythic elsewhere, while cowboy and tumbleweed merge into a single identity defined by its capacity to wander:

See them tumbling down,

Pledging their love to the ground!

Lonely, but free, I’ll be found,

Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds….³

“Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” while instantly popular on radio, gained its greatest fame in audiovisual format when Autry performed it in the film Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935). A generation before Guy Debord and the Situationists invented the concept of a wandering urban drift or dérive, Autry and Crosby help popularize the singing cowboy as a western icon of drift.

The singing cowboy in fancy western-style shirts (with pearl-headed snaps for buttons) adds an exotic glamour to the otherwise sweaty prospect of wandering through a land of sagebrush and heatstroke. The cowboy who strums his guitar by the campfire is no hobo but a figure straight out of central casting. His crucial accessories sometimes include a horse: as important as six-guns in representing male power, while also providing a sidekick to ease the occupational lonesomeness. A standard temptation scene offers the cowboy a chance to settle down and reject his drifting ways in order to marry the schoolmarm or heart-of-gold barmaid. The temptation, which means abandoning his horse and male freedom, must be refused:

Cares of the past are behind,

Nowhere to go, but I’ll find,

Just where the trail will wind,

Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds….

Wandering—aimless movement without a destination—is an antidote to confinement and takes the sinuous shape of the trail, winding and unwinding, with “nowhere to go.”

“Tumbling Tumbleweeds” confirms the showbiz pedigree of the singing cowboy. It was a Canadian, Bob Nolan, who wrote the lyrics in LA, in between temporary jobs as a lifeguard and golf caddy. He recorded it with a vocal group called Sons of the Pioneers, which included the group’s cofounder, Leonard Slye. Slye, a Midwest product, was a part-time actor who (in 1938) took the stage name Roy Rogers. Roy Rogers soon emerges as the quintessential singing cowboy at a moment when barbed wire, in use since the 1870s, was already converting the wide-open spaces into a patchwork of private ranches. Rogers helped keep the fantasy of western male drift alive well into the 1940s—long enough to launch one more singing cowboy classic, “Don’t Fence Me In.”

“Don’t Fence Me In,” although composed in 1934, doesn’t achieve massive fame until Roy Rogers showcases it in a 1944 film alongside his sidekick-companion, the beautiful golden palomino Trigger. (The same film introduces him to future wife and costar, Dale Evans.) With its plea for “land, lots of land,” the song crosses over from film to audio when Bing Crosby records it with the Andrews Sisters and sells a million copies.

Wandering in its singing cowboy version is usually a privilege of the white-hatted hero, but “Don’t Fence Me In” adds a significant twist, as the lyrics are originally sung by an outlaw, Wildcat Kelly. The sheriff is sending Wildcat to jail. Jail, however, is no place for a free-spirited wanderer, even if temporarily afoul of the law, and the song conveys Wildcat’s addresses to the sheriff:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,

Don’t fence me in.

Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,

Don’t fence me in.

Let me be by myself in the evenin’ breeze,

Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,

Send me off forever but I ask you please,

Don’t fence me in.⁴

Wildcat, while a lawbreaker, has the soul of a Romantic poet, not least in ignoring the bourgeois zeal for real estate and lawful gain. Geologists are prospecting for oil, developers are selling vacant lots, and crime syndicates will soon transform Las Vegas into a resort for gamblers and postmodern French sociologists. “Don’t Fence Me In,” among its ironies, is the plea of a singing criminal whose purpose is to avoid confinement, meaning jail.

The singing cowboy and cowboy song, forgotten and almost comical, nonetheless help to situate wanderers and wandering as key cultural representatives enshrined not only in specific genres such as the western film or novel but also across much of Western culture. All well and good. But does anyone today know what a Cayuse is?

Cole Porter most likely didn’t. He studied music in New Haven and Paris before residing in Manhattan, where he writes hit songs for Tin Pan Alley—the New York music publishing district named after the piano (tin pan). When Twentieth Century Fox asks him to write a cowboy song, Porter does what any city slicker might do. He buys a poem from a highway worker in Montana. He slightly reworks his $250 purchase, and the outcome is an overnight hit: “Don’t Fence Me In.” Attorneys from Montana arrive on cue to negotiate rights of coauthorship. Porter thus legally shares only one-half of the blame for a line that has surely puzzled singers ever since:

Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle

Underneath the western skies.

On my Cayuse, let me wander over yonder

Till I see the mountains rise.

Cayuse preserves the internal rhyme with loose, following the internal rhyme-fest set off with straddle and saddle, not to mention the jingle wander and yonder. But what on earth is a Cayuse?

Readers of Scribner’s Monthly in 1873 had a clear picture to draw on, even if they didn’t know that Cayuse ponies (named for a Native American tribe) had a nasty disposition—as readers could hardly miss in the illustration (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 “A Bucking Cayuse” (1873). Scribner’s Monthly, June 1873. Screenshot.

The accompanying text continues:

The ears are thrown back close to its head, the eyes put on a vicious expression, it froths at the mouth, seizes the bit with its teeth, tries to bite, and in every possible manner evinces the utmost enmity for its rider. Bucking is deemed as incurable as balking—whip and spur and ki...