In the
mid-twenties, when dude ranching became a profitable business,
song publishers in New York and Chicago moved to corral as many
Western songs as they could, lifting them from cowboys, pulp
nags, newspapers, even scribble on bunkhouse walls, with little
effort to find out whose they were. They took out copyrights on
the songs, changing just enough notes and words to satisfy the
copyright laws. If they were caught by an author, chances
are the author couldn't prove he was the originator of the song
or verse. The songs could be sung on the range for years
before a cowboy would wake up to the need to copyright his
creative output. By that time likely as not, someone would have
pirated his song and claimed it for their own.
One of the chief culprits was a man named
Powder River Jack Lee. He took Curley Fletcher's
Strawberry Roan along with Gail Gardner's Sierry
Peetes , put them in a songbook, and toured the country
with his wife Kitty. He played a steel guitar, sang the songs and
claimed that he wrote them. One day he ended up in Phoenix. By
that time Curly Fletcher and Gail Gardner had cemented a
friendship; and were "hot under the collar" about the theft of
their songs. Here is what Gail Gardner had to say about him when
asked about it 3 decades or so later: "That dude come swingin' into Phoenix thirty years ago packin' a
steel guitar and a
hula skirt fer his wife, Kitty. They found a rather sorry
reception for that sorta music on
the radio, so he bought hisself a fancy cowboy outfit, loaded
him and Kitty down with
belt buckles 'n boots and began singin' every cow song he could
wrap his tonsils around. Curley and me got pretty damn sore about his liftin' our songs
without so much as a by-your-leave, but when we got together to see what we could do
about it, we found our only
recourse was to sue him. Hell, he didn't own the clothes he
stood in, and of course neither
of us wanted Kitty."
It has been estimated that Curley Fletcher
had over half of his songs pirated before he got wise to the
need to copyright them.
In his book, "Songs Of the Sage", Curley Fletcher tells
that he spent most of his life in the West, mainly in the
Great American Desert in California. Referring to himself in the
third person, he said, he had been a cowboy, mule skinner,
prospector and what not, but he "refused to admit ever having
herded sheep". He goes on to say:
"While most of this life is now in the background, he still
feels the lure of the range and
the back-country. The odor of the desert sage is still fresh in
his nostrils and if he has
painted a vivid picture in verse- that is his earnest desire."