Beyond (perhaps) legal concerns I don't see a particular reason this wasn't issued as a Riders in the Sky album. Everybody on it Rides the Sky, commencing with Ranger Doug (Douglas B. Green when not clad in Hollywood cowboy duds) and extending to the three other members: Too Slim, Woody Paul and Joey the Cowpolka King. These are all Rider arrangements, which is to say the light-hearted sounds of a mostly imagined West. Maybe the difference is that there are no originals on Songs of the Frontier.

To an earlier generation -- specifically, our grandparents and great-grandparents -- "cowboy songs" were what Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the Sons of the Pioneers and their imitators did. In other words, not cowboy songs in the traditional sense -- actual cowpunchers sang a lot of songs which folksong collectors started recovering in the late years of the 19th century -- but pop tunes portraying an impossibly sunny, stress-free realm of honorable, well-scrubbed lads of the saddle. The style grew out of early country music and of cartoonish Western films. Many of the latter were musicals, written in good part by movie-industry composers who knew nothing about authentic range ballads, even those collected and available in books by John Lomax, Jack Thorp, Charles Siringo and others.

For a fully informative account you can't do better than Green's Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy (2002).

A handful of traditional songs did make it into the singing-cowboy repertoire. Given the context, this has always seemed remarkable to me. When I was a very little kid, I heard both authentic cowboy folk songs (mostly done authentically) and their faux counterparts. A couple of decades later, when I discovered an active passion for traditional music, I was able to sort out the sounds that had wafted through my naive young ears. My inclination then was to dismiss the fake stuff as ridiculous.

Fortunately, the eventual emergence of Riders in the Sky, who played real music with unexpected, even astounding skill yet always with a knowing wink, reminded me of the pleasures afforded by the silly and the inauthentic. I also came to learn who Bob Nolan, best known as a member and composer for the Sons of the Pioneers, was. Nolan wrote songs that aren't silly at all: "Cool Water," "One More Ride" and others that could almost pass as genuine prairie ballads.

Songs of the Frontier puts actually sung-in-the-saddle material from the 19th and early 20th centuries into the smooth vocals and harmonies, plus breezy pop- and jazz-based arrangements, of the singing-cowboy era. If you haven't heard Autry and the other stars of the genre, you may have heard how the Riders do it, which is how it's done here. (While I'm at it, this aside: Awhile ago I chanced to review an album by a family trio, based in a Western state, that performed and recorded this style of music. After that review appeared at Rambles.NET, the act's patriarch, a very nice old man, wrote to express both his gratitude and, startlingly to me, his utter sincerity about the band's mission. In contrast, say, to the Riders' ironic semi-distance.)

In any event, cowboys sang not just the ballads they made up or passed on (including prominently ones developed from Irish roots: "Green Grow the Lilacs" and "The Cowboy's Lament," aka "Streets of Laredo") but the sentimental pop songs of the time: "Molly Darling," "When the Roses Bloom Again" and "The Blue Juniata." I can't recall a time in my life I didn't know "The Strawberry Roan" and "The Old Chisholm Trail." The former has a known author -- Curley Fletcher, ca 1915 -- but it might as well be traditional. Like the fiddle tune "The Eighth of January," "The Hunters of Kentucky" (written two centuries ago by Samuel Woodworth) celebrates the title characters' role in the Battle of New Orleans. The reality of that conflict, in grim reality a pointless bloodbath, is not -- of course -- represented accurately. Still, it's an enjoyable piece, and only very rarely recorded. The last version I heard was on a 1950s album by the late Ed McCurdy.

If you like this sort of thing, and I claim decades' worth of like, you'll want to have Songs in your collection. You'll play it a lot, and you'll hum the tunes as you negotiate your way through a world infinitely more complicated than the one depicted here. In truth, the world of these songs was pretty complicated, too, but mostly Ranger Doug and compadres capture its melodic parts.