What is the original name....?!
Question: of the song "Streets of Larado" ?
Answers: of the song "Streets of Larado" ?
Cowboy's Lament
Cowboys Lament,I have it by Rex Allen and Marty Robbins
i believe it is A Handful of Laurel
"Streets of Laredo", also known as the "Cowboy's Lament", is a famous cowboy ballad in which a dying cowboy dispenses his advice to a living one.
Recordings of the song have been made by Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Roy Rogers, Marty Robbins, Chet Atkins, Arlo Guthrie, Rex Allen and many country and western singers, as well as avante garde rocker John Cale, the British pop group Prefab Sprout and Mercury Rev.
The song is universally credited to Traditional, and the origins are not entirely clear; but it seems to be primarily descended from an Irish/British folk song of the late 18th century called "The Unfortunate Rake", which has also evolved (with a time signature change and completely different melody) into the New Orleans standard "St. James Infirmary Blues". The Bodleian Library, Oxford, has a copy of a nineteenth century broadside entitled "The Unfortunate Lad", which is a version of the British ballad.[1] Some of elements of the song closely parallel those in the "Streets of Laredo":
Get six jolly fellows to carry my coffin,
And six pretty maidens to bear up my pall,
And give to each of them bunches of roses,
That they may not smell me as they go along.
Muffle your drums, play your pipes merrily,
Play the death march as you go along.
And fire your guns right over my coffin,
There goes an unfortunate lad to his home.
However, the cause of the Unfortunate Lad's demise is not a bullet wound but a sexually transmitted disease, as is clear from the verse:
Had she but told me when she disordered me,
Had she but told me of it at the time,
I might have got salts and pills of white mercury,
But now I'm cut down in the height of my prime.
This song goes back as far as the eighteenth century and has had several titles and the lyrics have changed but the melody has pretty much been the same. It has been called all of these names at different times:
Streets Of Laredo
The Cowboy's Lament
The Unfortunate Rake
The Unfortunate Lad
No Man's Land
Green Fields Of France
Very interesting question by the way. I would have to say my favorite version is Marty Robbins