The Old Chisholm Trail” is a cowboy song first published in 1910 by John Lomax in his book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. The song dates back to the 1870s, when it was among the most popular songs sung by cowboys during that era. Based on an English lyrical song that dates back to 1640, “The Old Chisholm Trail” was modified by the cowboy idiom. It has been recorded by the world’s most popular Western singers, including Harry McClintock, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Bing Crosby, Randy Travis, and Michael Martin Murphey, Tex Ritter, Jack Elliot, Charlie Daniels and Riders in the Sky. Yodeling Slim Clark recorded a yodeling version in 1957 for his album Cowboy Songs. The song was partially covered in the now-defunct Disneyland attraction “America Sings”. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.
In 2001, author Rosalyn Shanzer wrote a children’s book based on the song. It follows the adventures of some cowboys and their cattle as they travel the Old Chisholm Trail from Texas to Kansas.[5exas Confederate soldiers returning home from the Civil War found that in their absence the herds of longhorn cattle they were raising before the war had doubled in size and were now roaming the southern tip of the state unbranded. They were so plentiful that they had little value in Texas, but the industrial cities of the North were booming with immigrant labor and hungry mouths to feed. So began the era of the American cowboy and the great cattle drives, in which cattle were rounded up and herded north into Kansas, Missouri, and Wyoming. There they met the new railroad lines that could carry the meat to the East Coast. The first trail that was widely used for these long drives was called the Chisholm Trail. By the time the trail fell into disuse in 1882, hundreds of cowboys had driven tens of thousands of cattle up the trail, inventing and singing countless verses to “Old Chisholm Trail.”