Song of the Week #127
by Stan Jones
Or
"Riders In The Sky". Or "(Ghost) Riders In The Sky". Or
"Riders In The Sky (A Cowboy Legend)". Or just plain
"Ghost Riders", or "Ghostriders", or half-a-dozen other
variations over the years. But, however you label it,
it's a song unlike any other. It made its appearance
sixty years ago, when versions by Peggy Lee, Bing Crosby
and Burl Ives chased Vaughn Monroe up the hit parade, to
be followed over the decades by
Frankie Laine,
Dean Martin,
Marty Robbins,
Johnny Cash,
Elvis Presley, the Doors, Blondie's Debbie Harry, the
DNA Vibrators,
and the German heavy metal band
Die Apokalyptischen Reiter.
But, with all due respect to those fine vocal artistes,
the song's melodrama is made for a big-voiced baritone
like
Vaughn Monroe.
This very week - May 14th 1949 - he and his orchestra
hit Number One on the Billboard chart, and America was
gripped by one of the spookiest tales ever to haunt the
jukebox:
An old
cowpoke went riding out one dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way
When all at once a mighty herd of red-eyed cows he saw
A-plowin' through the ragged skies and up a cloudy draw
Yippee-yi-yay,
yippee-yi-yo
The ghost herd in the sky...
A
ghost herd in the sky? Where did that come from? From a
guy called Stan Jones - and it was, as they say on the
TV movies, based on a true story. Stan was born in 1914
near Douglas, in southeastern Arizona, and by the age of
12 was working at the D Hill Ranch. "I'd been sent out
to do a chore," he recalled, "so I saddled up my horse
and took off. After I'd finished my work, it was
beginning to blow up a storm, and, not having my poncho
along, I decided to take an old path up over the
mountain, which was between me and the ranch house. I
was hoping to beat the rain, 'course. Well, right up on
top of the ridge, I met an old, old cowpuncher, sort of
a weird old fellow."
This
was a leathery cuss called Cap Wells, and, without even
turning his head to look at young Stan, he said, "Son,
look up into the sky and you'll see the red-eyed cows of
the devil's herd." And the boy looked up, and, by golly,
there they were:
Their
brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of
steel
Their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he
could feel...
It
was, in fact, a meteorological effect: a peculiar cloud
formation caused by the collision of hot and cold air
currents. The clouds darkened, and lightning flashed,
and it really did look like a ghost herd pursued by
ghost riders:
A bolt of
fear shot through him as he looked up in the sky
For he saw the riders comin' hard and he heard their
mournful cry...
And
the "bolt of fear" was certainly real. The old cowboy
told the 12-year old that if he wasn't careful he'd be
joining the ghost riders, accursed to chase steers
across the desert sky for all eternity. "I was scared,"
said Stan. "You never saw a horse or boy get off a
mountain so fast in your life."
Jones grew up, left Douglas, worked in the copper mine
in Jerome, Arizona, then as a logger in the Pacific
Northwest, and eventually joined the National Park
Service - which is when the ghost riders rode back into
his life. "It was when I was stationed with the park
rangers in Death Valley," he remembered. "I happened to
look up into the sky. Well, sir, I saw that same kind of
a cloud formation as I had way back the other time, and
it sort of all came back to me. And I went inside and
wrote the song":
An old
cowpoke went riding out one dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way...
"Riders In The Sky" is one of those compositions whose
creation we can date precisely: June 5th 1948. It was
Stan Jones' 34th birthday, and with the help of his
guitar he fleshed out the scene he'd first witnessed on
top of the mountain 22 years earlier - the thundering
herd of hot-breathed, red-eyed cattle, pursued by the
eternally damned cowboys:
Their
faces gaunt, their eyes were blurred, their shirts all
soaked with sweat
They're riding hard to catch that herd but they ain't
caught 'em yet
'Cause they've got to ride forever on that range up in
the sky
On horses snortin' fire, as they ride on hear their cry:
Yippee-yi-yay, yippee-yi-yo
Ghost Riders In The Sky...
It's
a narrative-driven song, and it wouldn't strike many
musicologists as the most interesting tune in the world,
but it's undeniably effective, especially on those
ominous low notes at the end of each verse, followed by
the "mournful cry" of the ghost riders' yippee-yi-yay.
And Stan Jones wrapped it up with the warning he'd been
given all those years ago by ol' Cap Wells:
The
cowpokes loped on past him and he heard one call his
name
If you want to save your soul from hell a-ridin' on our
range
Then, cowboy, change your ways today or with us you will
ride
A-trying to catch the devil's herd across these endless
skies
Yippee-yi-yay, yippee-yi-yo
Ghost Riders In The Sky...
A
shame that after all those great rhymes in the first
stanzas ("steel"/"feel", "sweat"/"yet"), Jones falls
back on two bum pairings like "name"/"range" and
"ride"/"skies". Still, not bad for a couple of hours'
work. But so what? Jones was a park ranger. Fat lot of
good it does you turning out hit songs in the middle of
Death Valley. Stan and his wife Olive lived in a house
with no TV, radio, or even telephone, so he wasn't
exactly hip to the latest trends in pop music: Just
making contact with the rest of the world involved a
long dusty pick-up ride.
But
sometimes the world comes to you. Hollywood was making a
lot of westerns in those days, and no longer on the back
lot. So the National Park Service decided it might be
useful to have a guy they could refer the movie people
to when they came out from Los Angeles to scout for the
best locations. No-one knew the lie of the land like
Stan Jones, so he wound up with the gig. After a long
hot day's filming, there wasn't much for cast and crew
to do of an evening, so it was kind of relaxing to sit
under the stars round the campfire while Stan sang a few
of his songs. And one night, for the boys from the John
Ford picture Three Godfathers, the park ranger
got out his guitar and sang a weird tale about a "ghost
herd in the sky". It surely must have been especially
eery under a desert moon with the flames of the fire
flickering against the endless dark. When the song was
over, the film crew told him he needed to get a
publisher in Los Angeles.
So
he went to California and pounded pavement and knocked
on doors, and Burl Ives liked "Riders In The Sky". And,
when Burl's
recording session
was over, someone in the studio tipped off Vaughn Monroe
that there was a helluva song he'd just heard and Vaughn
ought to get to it right away. By Stan Jones' 35th
birthday - one year to the day after writing the song -
he'd had a Number One record (Monroe's) plus three other
hit versions, by Ives, Bing Crosby and Peggy Lee, plus a
Gene Autry
movie called Riders In The Sky, in which the
singing cowboy performs the song no less than three
times. Of these early interpretations, I confess I'm
entirely antipathetic to at least one of them. A little
Burl Ives goes way too long with me. I'll never forgive
him his record of "Swingin' On A Star". Instead of "if
that kind of life is what you wish", Burl
sings:
But then
if that kind of life is what you want
You may grow up to be a fish...
How
come nobody noticed that "want" doesn't rhyme with
"fish"? So I have no regrets that he got beaten to the
punch on "Ghost Riders". As for
Peggy Lee,
longtime readers know I love her, but "Ghost Riders" is
a song that loses a lot of power when a woman sings it.
Crosby is fine, although he takes it, as he did most
things, in his stride - so that the overall effect is
"Hey, there's some zombie cowboys stampeding ghost cows
across the sky, but it's no big deal..." Monroe's
version deservedly came out on top - at least as far as
I'm concerned. By contrast, Stan Jones never hesitated
when asked to name his favorite recording: the
Sons of the Pioneers,
whose frontman Bob Nolan wrote our Song of the Week #97,
"Tumbling Tumbleweeds".
By
now, Jones knew guys like Bob Nolan, and John Ford. The
cowboy actor George O'Brien introduced Jones to Ford,
who liked his songs so much he signed him to write the
score for The Wagon Master, with his pals the
Sons of the Pioneers handling the vocals. Jones went on
to compose for The Searchers and Rio Grande,
in which he also appears, as the sergeant who presents
the "regimental singers" (the Sons of the Pioneers) to
John Wayne. For just over a decade, "Riders In The Sky"
gave a park ranger from Death Valley a life he could
never have dreamed of - pop hits, major movies, albums,
and the TV series "Sheriff of Cochise". He was working
on a novel about Queen Nefertiti when he was diagnosed
with cancer. He died aged 49 in 1963, and was buried in
the town cemetery back in Douglas, in his beloved
Arizona.
Stan
Jones never heard Duane Eddy's twang-the's-thang guitar
version of "Ghost Riders", one of the earliest of the
many instrumental versions, from the Ramrods to the
Scorpions, from the Swedish rockers the Spotnicks to the
Shadows'
British hit single of the early Eighties. Jones never
heard
Dick Dale
or the
Ventures'
surf "Riders". He never heard Elvis sing it, nor Johnny
Cash. He never heard Milton Nascimento warble it in
Portuguese, or
Ned Sublette
perform it as a merengue. He never heard the Doors song
"Riders Of The Storm", which Robbie Krieger used to say
was inspired by "Riders In The Sky". He never heard the
band
Riders In The Sky,
nor saw the movie Ghost Rider, which includes a
rock version of the song by Spiderbait. Of course, in
some ways "Riders In The Sky" is merely a western
variant of the old European myth of the wilde jagd
- the "wild hunt" in which, on stormy nights, various
Norse gods, local kings, legendary warriors, or just a
bunch of no-name lost souls ride across the dark clouds
lit up by lightning flashes. Likewise, the first
Pirates Of The Caribbean would have rung a few
bells with Stan Jones. But no one has ever taken the
legend and distilled it so perfectly in music - now and
for all time:
'Cause
they've got to ride forever on that range up in the sky
On horses snortin' fire, as they ride on hear their cry:
Yippee-yi-yay,
yippee-yi-yo
Ghost Riders In The Sky...
Stan
Jones died too young. No soul in torment cursed to ride
the storm-tossed skies, but a man at rest in the town of
his birth, whose gravestone bears the words of his song
"Resurrectus":
I'll see
him in the sunrise
And just as day is done
No more to walk in darkness
For I know now my cares are none. |
