If you're of a certain age and haven't followed developments in the genre since then, you probably think of "cowboy songs" as the synthetic range-pop of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Sons of the Pioneers and others who rose to prominence decades ago in the era of insipid Western musicals. (Since the 1970s the Nashville-based Riders in the Sky have at once celebrated and satirized the genre.) From the 1980s onward, the cowboy-culture movement has carried with it newly composed but realistic, authentic-sounding ballads, most famously those from Alberta rancher and folksinger Ian Tyson.

The original cowboys of the latter 19th century brought songs with them to the plains and fashioned new ones, often from the templates of older ones, to accompany them on work that alternated between the tedious and the deadly. These were among the first songs I heard on records. I recall in particular "The Old Chisholm Trail" and "I Ride an Old Paint."

To this day I can listen to either with pleasure, and there's a fine version of the latter on Larry Hanks' The Last Wagon. He calls it "Goodbye, Old Paint." It's sometimes known as "Leaving Cheyenne." In my estimation, for what it's worth, it's the grandest cowboy song of them all. Ex-slave Charley Willis, its reputed author who worked as a Texas cattle driver, taught it to a very young Jess Morris around 1885. In 1942 Morris recorded his own fiddle-based version for the legendary folksong collector John A. Lomax. It incorporates a verse from the Child ballad "Lass of Loch Royal," which may or may not have been in Willis's original.

Not all of the 18 cuts are about cowboys (also known in those days as drovers and waddies). The album opens with "Elanoy," originally a commercial jingle intended to draw settlers and investors to Illinois, then thought of as "the West." (Not the only advertisement to become a folk song; so did "Rock Island Line.") In its usual form Woody Guthrie's "Tom Joad," a musical retelling of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, follows the melody of "John Hardy." Much later, Andy Irvine rewrote it as "The Ballad of Tom Joad," whose tune has a pleasing Irish lilt backing Guthrie's lyrics. Hanks includes it here, additional evidence, as if such were needed, that Hanks knows how to pick 'em.

Backed only by guitar, Hanks, a veteran of the Bay Area folk scene, balances serious songs with funny ones, delivering them in a weathered baritone like a fuller-voiced Utah Phillips. I thought of Phillips as I listened to the good-natured "The Roundup Cook." Phillips took that theme and turned it to melancholy in the classic "Goodnight-Loving Trail," lately revived on Ian & Sylvia's The Lost Tapes, to be reviewed shortly in this space. "The Trusty Lariat," from the pen of Haywire Mac McClintock (also responsible for "Big Rock Candy Mountain"), combines elements of cowboy song and train song to hilarious and preposterous effect.

I could go on, but before I move elsewhere, let me mention "Blue Mountain," covered by various artists over the years (Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Skip Gorman and Bob Weir come immediately to mind), but always welcome. It concludes the album on a properly autumnal note. I love everything about The Last Wagon. You will too, I hope.

If you want to make me instantly happy, just inform me there's a new Steve Howell album out. History Rhymes is his eighth. Before this one, I'd heard only the two most recent (reviewed here on 21 November 2015 and 24 July 2018). I am relieved that Bob Dylan's henchmen did not break his fingers upon learning that he shares an album title, the same Blind Blake line that Dylan borrowed for his 1992 Good As I Been to You, with His Royal Bobness. Perhaps his fingers still function only because Dylan remains ignorant of Howell's effrontery. Please don't tell him.

Anyway:

The relationship of folk to popular music is a complicated story. It was once a common practice for Tin Pan Alley songwriters to steal songs in the public domain to rework, rearrange and publish for their own profit (how "Frankie & Albert" became "Frankie & Johnny" for one instance). Traditional musicians (e.g., the Carter Family, Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon) brought 19th-century parlor ballads and early 20th-century pop tunes into the Southern repertoire. But in their native environments, which is to say the arrangements and performances those who created them had in mind, popular and folk aren't much alike.

On History Rhymes the Texas-based guitarist Howell and his partner, bass-player Jason Weinheimer (assisted by Dan Sumner and David Dodson), make traditional and Tin Pan Alley material all parts of a single American soundtrack. One would think all they have in common is their age. Yet the transition from Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen's show tune "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues" to the next cut, "Texas Rangers," a grim old-time ballad from the Indian Wars, feels seamless, entirely organic. Thematically, the two couldn't be less alike; still, the tunes, beautifully finger-picked and somberly sung by Howell, touch the emotions with almost equal force, though they should have no business doing as much.

Howell and associates transform familiar numbers in understated yet rather astonishing ways. The cut that took me most aback, "Jack of Diamonds," is a common folk song, sung by everybody from mountaineers to cowboys and just about any other trad singer whose path it crossed in its wanderings. The melody migrated over the ocean long ago, picking up new words (most of them floating verses) along the way. The tune is attached as well to the Scottish "Farewell to Tarwathie" and to Bob Dylan's "Farewell Angelina." It's a fine melody, but after I've heard it many hundreds of times over the years in various incarnations, it usually passes unnoticed when it enters my ears. Howell's arrangement, though, startled and riveted me, enough so that it's kept me returning to it as I wonder, How does he do that?

Well, truth is, I don't know. It's clear he does it, and every other song or instrumental he chooses to record, the way he hears it even if nobody else has heard it quite that way before. As you listen, you think, Well, of course, that's how it should be done.

I'm already waiting for the next release.