You will, of course, recall Johnny Cash from my previous post about the song Highwayman, performed by Cash and his fellow members of Country-Western supergroup The Highwaymen — without a doubt the Traveling Wilburys of musical supergroups.
You will, of course, also remember Johnny Cash as one of the most important and famous American musicians of all time.
In addition to writing and performing plenty of his own songs, Cash also performed his own versions of well-known older Country songs. Among those is the song “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky” — a song apparently deemed to be the greatest Western song of all time.
Although the song was originally recorded as recently as 1948 by Stan Jones, Jones himself claimed the inspiration for the song came from an old folk tale he heard as a child. Again, the song itself is fairly recent, but the idea of ghostly horsemen is both ancient and cross-cultural.
We have, for example, not only tales of the Germanic Wild Hunt, but also the English Herne the Hunter, the Welsh Mallt-y-Nos, the Slavic Yarilo and broadly similar groups of ghosts from non-European cultures like the Japanese Night Parade or Hawaiian Nightmarchers.
At its most simple, “Ghost Riders” is a cautionary tale-slash-morality play. An anonymous cowboy catches a glimpse of the herd of demon cattle (whether bulls or cows changes based on the version) being futility and perpetually chased across the sky by the phantoms of damned cowboys.
All in all, the ghostly cowboys provide their observer with a sort of come-to-Jesus moment. The moral of the story isn’t necessarily literally “Get Religion” – though given Johnny Cash’s own religious convictions, I feel like there’s at least a pretty clear implication of what exactly is involved in the phantoms saying:
If you wanna save your soul
From hell a-riding on our range
Then, Cowboy, change your ways today
Or with us you will ride
Trying to catch the devil’s herd
Across these endless skies.Lyrics from Musixmatch.
So, basically, it’s A Christmas Carol with (or possibly for) cowboys:
The full playlist is here.
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