Let me tell you about a visit I made to the Library of Congress the first week of January. Specifically, to the library’s American Folklife Center. I was following the trail of a prairie balladeer named Myra Hull.
Myra was of strong Yankee stock, Pilgrim stock, they liked to say, born the daughter of Lewis and Eliza Hull in 1878. They had come to Butler County, Kansas, by way of Ohio and settled along Eight Mile Creek, on the Diamond School Road. Hers was a singing family comprising farmers, teachers, preachers, and, you guessed it, singing cowboys. One of her uncles taught a singing school, that is, he taught evangelical church folk to sing revival songs.
Myra never married. She was active when young in the rural community around Douglas. In 1903 she attended a normal institute in Hutchinson and commenced teaching in country schools. She worked her way up to a job at Reno County High School, in Nickerson. Living, since her father died in 1902, with her mother, Eliza.
Thence to the University of Kansas for more study; I find Myra and her mother in a Lawrence city directory in 1919. From there she diverted to complete a teacher’s degree at the state normal in Emporia. Thence back to Lawrence, there eventually to complete a master’s degree and settle in teaching English at KU.
Living a quiet life, but she also had a secret life, as a collector and compiler of prairie folksong, especially cowboy ballads. Suddenly in 1939 she appears in the Kansas City press addressing the Women’s Dining Club on the subject, explaining she had commenced her ballad collection ten years earlier and now had more than 120 of them. None were culled from earlier collectors; all came from the singing and personal knowledge of her family and neighbors back home. Somehow at KU she had found her childhood musical traditions validated and had absorbed the ethos of ballad collecting.
She told her listeners, “I have observed the tradition of folk-ballad collectors in researching songs exactly as they were sung, being careful not to yield to the temptation to improve the text or to synthesize the variants.” As, so often, the pioneering folksong collector of the Great Plains, John Lomax, had done! Meanwhile, John’s son, Alan Lomax, had become a key figure in the founding and development of the folklife center in Washington.
In 1937 Myra went there for research. While she was there, Lomax took her into the Coolidge Auditorium to record the songs she knew, dozens of them. I spent a day at the center with earphones on, listening, conscious of the archivists around me as I sang along, quietly, learning Myra’s tunes and styles.
What a deep debt we owe Myra Hull, this Emily Dickinson of cowboy balladry. Let me mention one of her tunes, “Night Herding Song,” a fairly well known ballad, but known mostly on the northern plains, Montana and Dakota. As Myra sings her Kansas version, voice untrained but pitch-perfect in the key of D, its timbre conveys empathy and love. This is her music.
O move slow dogies, quit moving around
You have wandered and trampled all over the ground
O graze along dogies and feed kinda slow
And don’t forever be on the go
O move slow, dogies, move slow
And her refrain, sung first boldly, then in faint echo: “Ky-o, ki-o-o-o. . . . Ky-o, ky-o-o-o”
