Yodeling Kid's Collection of Songs--Old Time, Cowboy and Mountain Ballads

Item Details

Yodeling Kid's Collection of Songs--Old Time Songs and Mountain Ballads

Black buckram boards with heavy duty metal binding apparatus. Corners rubbed with soiling and wear to boards. Red pebbled cover page has moisture damage at bottom edge which has bled into the title page. The tide mark from moisture intermittently reappears in several areas of the book. Interior leaves are toned but generally clean. Several leaves show chipping to fore edge. Good condition. 

Tremendous collection of typed lyrics of folk songs, old timey tunes, cowboy tunes and mountain ballads a compiled by Morell Raymer, the Yodeling Kid, circa 1935. Several songs also have guitar chords notated. This songbook contains a wealth of familiar folk songs but more importantly many tunes of limited or unknown circulation. It features the songs of prominent artists of the day such as Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff and the Carter Family, and a tremendous number of cowboy and western themed songs. Many of the songs were likely regional favorites of the day as they are not widely known today. Many songs also contain lyrics not included in recorded versions, due to the time limitations of recording, for example, “Red River Valley” has nine verses, and “Old Joe Clark” has ten.

Entire collection appears to be original typed pages utilizing at least two different typewriters. Two pages of song titles are laid in. One manuscript page laid in. 32 songs at the end of the book have chord notations in manuscript. Hundreds of songs in total.

Even though the title page states "Book No. 1", we've found no references to further editions.

Weirdly we've been unable to find much out about [Oryn] Morell Raymer other than notes of numerous awards he won in high school and references to he and his wife performing for small social gatherings in Indiana. Their marriage lasted four years and ended in divorce.  WKBF operated under those call letters from 1926-1935 from Rock Island, Illinois

A veritable treasure trove for any musicologist.