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It was autumn 1889, and a trail boss named Sawyer was driving a thousand cattle up through Crosby County in Texas to the railheads in Kansas, when he and his cowboys stopped for the night atop a mesa. What happened next is disputed, but in the night, for whatever reason, the cattle stampeded, charging off the hill. Two cattlemen were killed, and around 700 animals died. The next year, another cattle drive stopped in the same place. Again, in the night, the cows stampeded. Again, men and beasts plunged to their death.
Thereafter, cowboys took a dim view of Crosby County. Whispers went round. It wasn’t storms or rustlers that spooked the cattle. It was shadowy riders driving them, appearing out of the night and causing chaos. Ghost riders who came from the sky, driven by demons.
For Texans, that’s the origin myth of one of the staples of American song: “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend”. Stan Jones had been a child in wild Arizona — his parents had been among the first settlers in Cochise County — though he was transplanted to Los Angeles in his youth, and went on to get a master’s in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked scores of jobs and wrote songs in his spare time. At 12 years old, he said, an old Native American told him the legend of the souls that leave their bodies and haunt the sky, as ghost riders, like the ones who had caused chaos in Texas.
When Jones wrote “Ghost Riders” in 1948, it was in a style called “western music” — “country and western” was an awkward portmanteau covering two very distinct genres. Country music has its roots in folk, while western music has the rhythms of horses trotting, its songs infused with yodels and cries. The rise of the Western movie and the romanticisation of the cowboy meant that through the 1930s and ’40s, western music was a staple of US pop culture.
Nearly 80 years on, Jones’s original version of “Ghost Riders” — recorded with the magnificently named Death Valley Rangers — sounds like a collection of clichés: the chugging rhythm, the refrains of “Yippie-yi-oo/Yippie-yi-yay”, the reverb and echo slathered all over the recording. It’s so studiedly cowboyish that you half expect it to turn into the Rawhide theme halfway through (indeed, Marty Wilde later rolled the two songs together into a medley).
But back in the 1940s, “Ghost Riders” was genre-defining. If western music was popular, this was its “My Way”. It was chart-breaking too: Vaughn Monroe’s version was Billboard’s number one song for 1949 — competing against recordings by Burl Ives, Peggy Lee, Bing Crosby, and Gene Autry, who featured it in the film Riders in the Sky,
The notion of the ghost rider was a perfect piece of Americana: the lonesome, haunted man in black forever traversing the wilderness, and it resonated deeply. Jim Morrison took the horsemen down to earth, and they became the “Riders on the Storm”. Marvel comics created a Ghost Rider who stalked America on a motorbike, and Suicide commemorated that new iteration on their 1977 debut album on the track “Ghost Rider” — about a “ghost rider, motorcycle hero”. Stan Jones had created an American archetype.
His song proved surprisingly versatile. As the crooners who originally sang it faded with the birth of rock’n’roll, a new cohort of musicians took it up — the hollow twang of its melody suited perfectly the new wave of instrumental acts playing electric guitars. It became a classic for Duane Eddy, The Shadows, The Ramrods and The Trashmen.
It remained a Nashville staple — Johnny Cash reached number two in the country charts with his 1979 version, and he also recorded it with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson as The Highwaymen. Occasionally, 21st-century versions crop up: Merseyside band The Coral, who draw on melodic esoterica no matter where it comes from, recorded an excellent version free of raised eyebrows and any hint of a joke.
The real winner, though, was Jones. In the wake of his song’s success, he befriended the film director John Ford, and became a dedicated writer of bespoke western music for Ford’s movies. He had created an artificial West in his best known song, and now he was paired with the greatest mythologiser of the cowboy world. Like the man who shot Liberty Valance, he had transcended facts and entered legend.
Let us know your memories of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ in the comments section below
The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers
Music credits: NFM; Better Tomorrow; Warner; The Tyrone Berkeley Company; The Autry Foundation/Varese Sarabande; Elektra; Revega/Mute; Curb; Parlophone; MVE; K-tel; Sony; Fast Draw; Deltasonic