Home on the Range

The story

In 1871 Dr. Brewster M. Higley moved from Indiana to Smith County, Kansas, where he took land under the Homestead Act and lived in a small cabin near West Beaver Creek. Moved by the country around him, he wrote the poem "My Western Home", in 1872 or 1873 by most accounts, though at least one source dates it as early as 1871. It was printed in the Smith County Pioneer in 1873 or 1874 and again in The Kirwin Chief on 21 March 1874. Higley's friend Daniel E. Kelley (1843–1905), a member of the Harlan Brothers Orchestra, worked out a melody for it on his guitar. Higley's words are close to the version sung today but not the same: the original poem did not contain the words "on the range". His cabin is now on the National Register of Historic Places as the Home on the Range Cabin.

Ranchers, cowboys and other western settlers took the song up as a rural anthem, and it spread across the United States in many forms and under several names, "Home on the Range" and "Western Home" the most common. Cowboys driving cattle on the Chisholm Trail seem to have carried it from state to state. The folklorist John Lomax printed it in 1910 in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, and reported that he had learned it from a Black saloon keeper in Texas who remembered it from the Chisholm Trail. In 1925 the Texas composer David W. Guion arranged it as sheet music, published by G. Schirmer.

The words had been borrowed almost from the start. On 26 February 1876 The Kirwin Chief accused The Stockton News of "PLAGIARISM" for printing a nearly identical poem under the name of a Mrs. Emma Race of Raceburgh, Kansas, and reprinted the poem it had published in 1874. When Bing Crosby's recording with Lennie Hayton and his orchestra on 27 September 1933 made the song widely popular, its origins were obscure, and in 1934 William and Mary Goodwin sued for $500,000, claiming it copied their "An Arizona Home" of 1905. Investigating on behalf of the Music Publishers Protection Association, Samuel Moanfeldt also found a similar "Colorado Home", but within a few months concluded that Higley had written the poem and Kelley had set it to music.

On 30 June 1947 "Home on the Range" became the state song of Kansas, and it is often called the unofficial anthem of the American West. Frank Sinatra, Gene Autry, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger and many others recorded it; it was the theme of the 1950s television series The Range Rider and is sung in films from The Awful Truth (1937) to Where the Buffalo Roam (1980, by Neil Young) and The Messenger (2009, by Willie Nelson). The University of Kansas band, the Marching Jayhawks, plays it at the end of every home athletic event. In 2010 members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 western songs of all time, and a 2017 docudrama told the story of its origins and of the lawsuit.

What it says

A settler's song of contentment with life on the open plains: a home among the buffalo, deer and antelope, under clear skies and pure air, which the singer would not trade for any city. In the 1910 text one verse says, without regret, that the Native people had been driven from this part of the West and would likely never return. The mood is calm and wistful, a picture of the frontier as its settlers wished to see it.

The words