As I walked the streets of Laredo / walked out in Laredo one day / I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen / Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay.
The song itself, or rather the melody, is a very old one, documented back to the early 17th Century, as a Royal Navy capstan or pumping shanty - ‘Spanish Ladies’, but there are Irish versions, eg ‘The Bard of Armagh’ and numerous American versions too.
‘I went to a dance last night in old Tomby,
There was plenty of girls there as fine as you wish,
There was one pretty maid there a chewin’ tabaccy,
When I think of Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in "My Darling Clementine", lounging in a chair on the wooden sidewalk outside The Grand Hotel in Tombstone, but springing to attention when pretty young Miss Clementine Carter gets off the midday stagecoach, I can easily see him in the role of Gus McCrae, leaving Jimmy Stewart to play against type as Jake Spoon. I'm looking forward to seeing that original Wayne/Stewart/Fonda version of "Lonesome Dove" when I finally get to that last big roundup in the sky.
Bogdanovich wanted known stars for box office draw and those three had the star power to bring in audiences—at least Wayne still had that power in the early 1970s. I would have loved to seen that movie, though I’m pretty partial to the miniseries. But it certainly would be fascinating to see what Wayne, Fonda, and Stewart would have done with the characters given the fact that the Jones, Duvall, and Urich portrayals are so iconic.
Thanks for sharing this backstory.
The song itself, or rather the melody, is a very old one, documented back to the early 17th Century, as a Royal Navy capstan or pumping shanty - ‘Spanish Ladies’, but there are Irish versions, eg ‘The Bard of Armagh’ and numerous American versions too.
‘I went to a dance last night in old Tomby,
There was plenty of girls there as fine as you wish,
There was one pretty maid there a chewin’ tabaccy,
Jus’ like a young kitten a chewin’ a fish,’
And so on….
LF
Yep. It’s an old melody with many different version of lyrics. A sad tune.
When I think of Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in "My Darling Clementine", lounging in a chair on the wooden sidewalk outside The Grand Hotel in Tombstone, but springing to attention when pretty young Miss Clementine Carter gets off the midday stagecoach, I can easily see him in the role of Gus McCrae, leaving Jimmy Stewart to play against type as Jake Spoon. I'm looking forward to seeing that original Wayne/Stewart/Fonda version of "Lonesome Dove" when I finally get to that last big roundup in the sky.
Bogdanovich wanted known stars for box office draw and those three had the star power to bring in audiences—at least Wayne still had that power in the early 1970s. I would have loved to seen that movie, though I’m pretty partial to the miniseries. But it certainly would be fascinating to see what Wayne, Fonda, and Stewart would have done with the characters given the fact that the Jones, Duvall, and Urich portrayals are so iconic.
Some of this I knew, most of it I knew not. It’s time to find my copy of John Lomax’s “ Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads“ (1910).
Great book.