I Ride an Old Paint
by Gregg Smith
4-Part - Sheet Music

Bass solo, SATB choir a cappella

SKU: MN.CH-1392

Composed by Gregg Smith. 21st Century. Score. Laurendale Associates #CH-1392. Published by Laurendale Associates (MN.CH-1392).

UPC: 768544006673. English.

I Ride an Old Paint is a traditional American cowboy song published in the 1927 American Songbag by Carl Sandburg who wrote that the song came to Western poets Margaret Larkin and Linn Riggs in Santa Fe from a cowboy who was heading for the Mexican border. He described the song as one of a man in harmony with the values of the American West: "There is rich poetry in the image of the rider so loving a horse he begs when he dies his bones shall be tied to his horse and the two of them sent wandering with their faces turned west." Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time. The song is found in Aaron Copland's ballet Rodeo and in Virgil Thomson's film score for The Plow That Broke the Plains. Gregg's version of the text differs from the Sandburg version suggesting an alternate source for the text contained herein. The original text, from Carl Sandburg's American Songbag of 1927 is printed on page 11 of this score. No actual metronome markings are in the original manuscript, nor complete dynamic markings. Editorial dynamics and tempi are in parenthesis.