Song of the day: The Goodnight-Loving Trail… a moo-ving experience
March 19, 2025
Bill Taylor writes: I don’t know of many folk songs that concern themselves with the Wild West, the Old West, call it what you will (it wasn’t nearly as wild as portrayed on the screen). Musically, it’s a subject that seems to lend itself more readily, and often over-sentimentally, to country and western.
But there’s one that I love – sung best, I think, by the late, inimitable Rab Noakes – that very much belongs in the folk canon.
It’s about a cattle drive, minus the glamour and constant drama of the old Rawhide TV series, which debuted in 1959, co-starred a youthful Clint Eastwood and was wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic. I never used to miss it.
In reality, herding cattle across vast tracts of land was a tedious, strenuous, dangerous, dirty job. And when you were too ground down to do it anymore, all that was left was to become the cook – usually nicknamed “the old
woman”.That’s what and who The Goodnight-Loving Trail is all about. And if you think the title, at least, is romantic, think again.
Charles Goodnight and OIiver Loving were ranchers, who made their fortunes in the 1860s by establishing a route more than 2,000 miles long from Texas to Colorado and Wyoming to supply Texas longhorns to the growing western market for beef.
Getting the cattle from A to B was a long, slow business. It could take up to six months. But it paid dividends.
(Going nowhere fast: image by Bill Taylor)
The song was written by Bruce Duncan “Utah” Phillips, who died aged 73 in 2008. A self-described anarchist, he was also a folk singer, poet, storyteller and labour organizer. It’s no surprise that The Goodnight-Loving Trail is hard-nosed and impassive, rooted in reality.
This is Phillips’s own performance of the song:
Some of the lyrics may need a little explanation:
Too old to wrangle or ride on the swing…
The wrangler took care of the large string of horses the cowboys rode during the cattle drive.
Swing riders rode at each side of the herd, keeping the cattle together and stopping any of them breaking away.
With your snake oils and herbs and your liniment, too,
You can do anything that a doctor can do…
Disrespected as the cook may have been, he was a linchpin of the cattle drive, also acting as doctor and dentist, barber and even banker. The morale of the drovers largely depended upon him, and he was usually more highly paid than the cowboys.
Incidentally, the all-purpose chuck wagon – a cattle drive cliché – was invented by Charles Goodnight.
(The ghost of chuckwagons past: image by Bill Taylor)
Noakes gives Phillips’s song a bit of a country flavour, leavened by a wailing harmonica that echoes the cook’s “French harp” blowing “like a lone bawling calf”.
His was the first version I ever heard of the song, on his second album, released in 1972. It’s still my favourite.
But there’s another rendition, very different but lovely, that I’m fond of, by a Canadian close harmony trio, Finest Kind. Based in Ottawa, Ian Robb, Ann Downey and Shelley Posen came together in the early 1990s. They toured the world and recorded seven albums before retiring in 2015.
Finally, and purely for reference purposes, here are the opening and closing credits for Rawhide, with Frankie Laine, a classic in his own right, singing the theme song.
Head ’em up, move ’em out…
That song is a favourite of mine, and I reckon Rab's is the best version I've heard.
Posted by: John Clark | March 19, 2025 at 06:04 PM