I Ride an Old Paint

by Pa Rock

Music Appreciator

Back when I was in junior high school - a loose term covering grades seven and eight of a school that contained grades one through twelve - in the very early 1960's, we had a music class that was officially called "Glee Club."   Girls had Glee Club three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and boys met twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  On days when either gender was not in Glee Club, they were in Physical Education (PE), which meant the boys had PE one day a week more than the girls - every week.

Twenty years later when I became the principal of that same little school - and the same music teacher was still there, a very sweet lady named Mrs. Alexander - that same scheduling routine was still in effect.  But before classes began in the fall a woman who was new to the community came to my office wanting to look the school over for one of her children who would be attending there.  By that time the county high schools had consolidated, and what remained in our community was a K-8.

The visitor asked about the scheduling for junior high PE and Music, and I told her about the system that had been in effect for decades, probably since the little school first opened its doors.  She replied, very nicely, that that system would need to change.  Being fairly progressive myself, I understood her point, and beginning that year we went to a system whereby boys and girls alternated each week on which group got three sessions of which class.  Not too long after that I hired the woman who had pointed out the educational inequity as the girl's PE teacher and coach.

(Today we would probably both be fired based on some DEI complaint about prejudice against a well-established tradition of white male privilege.)

All of that was an unnecessary prelude into the topic I intend to discuss, which is the school's Boys Glee Club from the 1960's, but I wanted to provide some sense of the situation and the times.

The music curriculum had its own building where the marching band met and the various grades had their music (vocal) classes.  The main room had an old piano which was used by the teacher, and a couple of sets of wooden risers where the students sat.  The junior high used a set of ratty old song books that contained a hundred or so songs, most of which were old standards that lots of people knew.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the teacher would pound away on the piano while the boys had a good time bellowing out the tunes.

I just remember a few.  One was "Papa Tony" which had an "Omp-pa-pa" refrain that was kind of fun to sing - and made for some great noise, and a couple were well known cowboy songs.  One of those was Cole Porter's classic "Don't Fence Me In," a paean to the cowboy's independent lifestyle, and the other was an older cowboy song called "I Ride an Old Paint."  The words of both songs have stuck with me through the years, and it is not uncommon to occasionally hear updated versions of "Don't Fence Me In" over various media.

"I Ride an Old Paint," however is not so common, but this past week it was mentioned in a blog posting by entertainer Garrison Keillor, and that got this tired old typist to remembering Glee Club.  As I read Keillor's mention of using that song as a sing-along on one of his radio programs performed before a live audience, I realized that I remembered most of the words and could have sung along to it as well.  But who wrote it, and what was its history?

It was time to do a little research.  

A quick scroll through the internet revealed that "I Ride an Old Paint" was a "traditional" cowboy song with no specific author or composer, just something that cowboys had come up with and no doubt modified as they used it to calm their cattle and entertain themselves during the evenings on the long, dusty cattle drives.  But the most interesting thing about the song's history was that it had been "collected" and preserved by master American poet, Carl Sandburg, in his "American Songbag" in 1927.

For anyone who would like to sing their way through some genuine American history, here are the lyrics of the first verse and the chorus, the best know parts of a longer ballad.    There are no cattle that need calming, just a room full of boisterous adolescent boys, so sing loudly if you want to be heard!

I Ride an Old Paint

I ride an old paint

I lead an old Dan

I'm goin' to Montan'

For to throw the hoolihan

They feed in the coulees

They water in the draw

Their tails are all matted

Their backs are all raw

Ride around, little dogies

Ride around them slow

For the fiery and snuffy are a-rarin' to go

Class dismissed.