The Highwayman and the Bandit
How an English poem inspired a cowboy song
True story: one day, many years ago, I was listening to the classic Sons of the Pioneers number “Song of the Bandit,” a rollicking, slightly melancholy ballad about a Wyoming outlaw and the sweetheart waiting for him in the hills. For some reason the thought drifted through my head: “This kind of reminds me of ‘The Highwayman’.”
Today, many people might remember Alfred Noyes’ 1906 poem best from Megan Follows reciting a portion of it toward the end of Anne of Green Gables (1984), or perhaps Loreena McKennit’s 1997 song which set an abridged version of the verses. I knew it on the page, too, growing up: it was in Helen Ferris’ wonderful anthology Favorite Poems Old and New—a staple on the family bookshelf—alongside other familiar classics like “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Casey at the Bat,” “Casabianca,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
It seemed like a random thought, connecting it with a 1930s cowboy song. But imagine my surprise when I found out that “Song of the Bandit” was, in fact, literally inspired by “The Highwayman.”
“From the days of Robin Hood, we’ve all been interested in romantic outlaws,” was how the song’s composer Bob Nolan, founding member and de facto leader of the Sons of the Pioneers, introduced the song on a 1940s radio program. “The west had its share of Robin Hoods, too, and one of these struck my imagination. The result—the wild, yodeling melody of ‘The Song of the Bandit’.”
In a 1979 interview with Douglas B. Green1, Nolan recalled, “I had read an old English poem called ‘The Highwayman.’ Maybe you have, too, if you’ve studied English literature. I forget now who wrote it but it was very impressive to me so I turned it into a western atmosphere thing and it’s almost word for word.”
Coming over forty years after writing the song and who knows how many years since re-reading “The Highwayman,” the exaggeration of “almost word for word” is forgivable. But even though the structure and form of the two compositions is different enough—seventeen stanzas of poem, over against a snappy three-verses-and-a-chorus song—the central idea is clearly recognizable as the same: a ballad of a mysterious mounted outlaw who visits his love by moonlight, with an ultimately tragic end for them both. Both song and poem can be fitted to the beat of a galloping horse—and both conclude with a ghostly finale. (Like McKennit’s version and the recitation scene in Anne of Green Gables, “Song of the Bandit” omits the character of the jealous ostler, probably simply for space.)
What was closer to being word for word was the way the two authors described their inspiration for writing the respective verses. Romantic—in its original sense—was the key word. “I think the success of the poem...was because it was not an artificial composition, but was written at an age when I was genuinely excited by that kind of romantic story,” wrote Alfred Noyes in his autobiography in 1953.2 Noyes was twenty-four, and had had his first volume of poetry published two years before when he was still at Oxford, though he had been writing poetry since about age fourteen. Nolan was twenty-nine, six years into a career as a musician-songwriter that had started in the hardscrabble early years of the Great Depression, though he too had been writing poetry since high school.
“Song of the Bandit” made its debut in the 1937 Columbia film Outlaws of the Prairie, and piano/vocal/guitar sheet music for the song was included in the song folio Bob Nolan’s Cowboy Classics, No. 1 in 1939 (a book of eighteen songs for fifty cents—those were the days!). It became a popular Sons of the Pioneers standard, with radio transcriptions cut in 1937 and 1940 and an RCA studio recording in 1963, and a brief movie appearance again in the 1943 Roy Rogers feature Man From Music Mountain (alternate title, for no apparent reason, Texas Legionaires). My personal favorite recording is the 1940 transcription: the rollicking beat and D-major key, both kicked up a notch from most other renditions, seem to highlight the themes of galloping horse and mountain setting the best.
(Interestingly, the sheet music features a possible misprint, rendering the second line of the first verse “fair as the sweetest flower blooming in the shade.” The 1937 and 1940 transcriptions with Nolan himself singing lead have the word as “glade,” which to me makes more sense, as well as being a more creative choice of word, but the 1963 recording with Tommy Doss on lead and covers by other artists follow the sheet music and use “shade.”)
It wasn’t the only time a poetic influence cropped up in Bob Nolan’s cowboy-song repertoire. Nolan (who incidentally never learned to read music) read poetry widely and had an avowed fondness for the Romantic poets, and allusions to his favorites can be picked up throughout his lyrics. A seeming reference to Keats’ “Endymion” is tucked into the last lines of the chorus to “(When the Prairie Sun Says) Good Mornin’,” (an abbreviated rendition of the song starts at 0:48 in this video) and a direct quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells” (“Keeping time, time, time / With a sort of Runic rhyme...”) forms the backbone of the chorus to the otherwise distinctly swing-inspired “On the Rhythm Range” (“Everything is keeping time / To a sort of Runic rhyme / And rhythm”).
The trail of inspiration that began with Alfred Noyes didn’t end with “Song of the Bandit,” either. In the 1979 interview, Nolan said that Marty Robbins, who covered the song himself, had told him it was a favorite and said it inspired him in writing his hit song “El Paso.” A trail of poetic hoofbeats winding from the moors of England to the hills of Wyoming to the deserts of the Southwest…it’s a fascinating study in how authors from different times and places can inspire each other, and how many different places timeless themes of adventure, romance, and tragedy can take you.
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https://archive.org/details/twoworldsformemo00noye/page/38/mode/2up Noyes stated that he wrote the poem at age twenty-four and it was published “shortly afterwards”—it appeared in the August 1906 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, when Noyes was twenty-six, which would put the writing of it in about 1904.