Buffalo Bill’s
Famous Cowboy Band
by Michael L. Masterson
Buffalo Bill Cody’s life as a showman provides the time frame for the music found on this recording. Cornet player Willian Sweeney organized and directed Buffalo Bill’s Cowboy Band from the very beginning when Cody organized his first Wild West show at “The Old Glory Blowout” in North Platte, Nebraska, on the Fourth of July, 1882, to Buffalo Bill’s 1913 “Farewell Tour” with Pawnee Bill in the “Two Bills’ Show.” Providing music for Buffalo Bill after Sweeney came two of the twentieth century’s most famous band directors. Karl L. King, march composer and baritone horn player, led the band for the Sells-Floto Circus that hired Buffalo Bill for its Wild West specialty act in 1914 and 1915. In 1916, cornet player and later long time director of the Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus Band, Merle Evans, directed music for Buffalo Bill as band leader of the Miller Bros 101 Ranch Show, Cody’s last employer before his death in 1917.
Though the Wild West show still attracts much attention from both historians and the general public, little regard has been given to the music that accompanied this influential exhibition. Excited by the show’s intense visual drama and the action-packed, mythic, arena storytelling, American and European audiences vicariously experienced specific historic incidents and other aspects of the Western experience. To complete the show’s sensory experience, the Cowboy Band paced, animated, and expressed the necessary aural moods to enhance the performance and further thrill audiences, as does music at such contemporary cultural events as films, sports games, circuses, and more. This recording by the Americus Brass Band, perhaps America’s premier historical band, finally recreates for modern audiences the authentic, mostly nineteenth century sounds of this often overlooked aspect of the Wild West performance.
The Cowboy Band became famous by working hard. For many years a normal Wild West traveling day in America kept the Cowboy Band busy from morning until well after sundown. After traveling in a train all night to the next town on the schedule, the performers breakfasted early to prepare themselves for a late morning parade on the city streets. Featuring all the Wild West performers including Cowboys, Indians, wild animals, Rough Riders from around the world, the Side Show band, other exotic performers, Buffalo Bill himself, and the Famous Cowboy Band riding matched gray horses, the parade drummed up interest for the shows held later in the day.
The Cowboy Band was a moderately sized band for the times. Photos of the 1887 Cowboy Band in London reveal a sixteen piece band with a D flat piccolo, an E flat clarinet, three B-flat clarinets, three B flat comets including Sweeney, two trombones, a baritone, two E flat alto horns, one tuba, a snare drummer, and a bass drummer. Listing a piccolo, four clarinets, three alto horns, five cornets, three trombones, a baritone, a B-flat bass tuba, an E-flat bass tuba, and two drums the 1896 Wild West Route Book reveals twenty-one members in “Buffalo Bill’s famous Cowboy Band,” the size band best represented in this recording.
A London newspaper in 1887 commented: “they (the Cowboy Band) upset all one’s previous ideas about the correct costume of musicians, but they play with spirit.”1Don Russell, The Wild West: A History of the Wild West Shows, (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum of Art, 1970), p. 29. Unusual for an era in which bands normally used military style uniforms, the Cowboy Band wore attire based on the outfit of the American working cowboy. By wearing such a practical uniform based on clothes worn by actual western ranch workers, as observed in the accompanying photographs, the band reinforced hard-working western American images and values. Contrary to many publicity reports, however, most of the band members were not working cowboys from the West. For example, brothers John and Andrew Link, like many of the other band members, were hired in New York City before the Wild West show left for London in 1887.
From their normal position in the corner of the Wild West arena between the reserved seats and grandstand seats across from the performers main entrance, the Cowboy Band regularly played a pre-show concert. Like most bands of this “Golden Age of Bands” era, the Cowboy Band played marches, patriotic tunes, “arrangements of popular songs of the day all kinds of dance music from the waltz to the ragtime cakewalk, medleys of opera and operetta tunes, descriptive and novelty pieces, and transcriptions from the standard orchestral literature.”2James R. Smart, Record jacket notes on The Sousa and Pryor Bands: Original Recordings, 1901-1926, (New York: New World Records, NW 282, 1976). Wild West programs often carried advertisements for music publishers saying that the Cowboy Band would play popular ragtime songs from their company’s catalog sometime during the band’s performance.
After the pre-show concert, the Wild West began in mid- afternoon and again in the evening with its official musical opening – the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner. This standard practice occurred nearly fifty years before the “Banner” became America’s official national anthem in 1931. Because of the thirty years of Wild West touring that helped spread this musical tradition, it could be argued that the general public’s acceptance of the Star Spangled Banner as our National Anthem demonstrates another example of Cody’s (and band director Sweeney’s) influence on American culture.
Following the “Banner” it was time for the Cowboy Band to “follow the traditions of circus bands everywhere and provide accompaniment for the various (Wild West) acts and bridges between acts”3Sarah Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 55. such as The Grand Procession, Annie Oakley’s shooting act, the Pony Express, Capture of the Deadwood Mail Coach By the Indians, Buffalo Hunt, The Battle of the Big Horn, Custer’s Last Charge, Cowboy Fun, and more.4Wild West show programs available in the Western History Section of the Denver Public Library Denver, Colorado; the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; or at the Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wisconsin. Though not a show or circus but an educational exhibition to the show’s managers and publicists, the Wild West functioned like a circus for the Cowboy Band with constant musical changes needed to aurally enhance the lively visual action in the arena. Their music paced, animated, set appropriate moods, heightened audience’s responses, and provided organized sounds to fill in the dead spots between acts. So similar were playing characteristics and repertoire of circuses and wild west shows that musicians, like director Merle Evans for example, often moved from one kind of venue to the other.
No recordings of the original Cowboy Band have been found, but the Brooklyn Times reported that the band provided an “obligato” for the performance. Buffalo Bill himself wrote about how “appropriate the music from Mr. Sweeney’s Cowboy Band” was to the show’s scenes of American history.5W. F. Cody, Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats, (Chicago: Charles C. Thompson, Inc., 1902), p. 752. J. Jay Watson writing for the London Evening News on July 25, 1887, called their playing “really beautiful music… a musical treat… and a musical combination worth listening to.” The London columnist for the New York World newspaper wrote on August 20, 1887, that the Cowboy Band “discoursed excellent music during the afternoon.” According to a story in the London Umpire on Sunday, April 1, 1888, the Cowboy Band presented to their director, William Sweeney, “one of America’s first cornet soloists,” a “handsomely engraved gold and silver-plated cornet, made and specially designed by the F. Besson & Co., London, England.” This evidence suggests that Sweeney and the Cowboy Band not only performed their functional tasks in the arena but also handled the aesthetic and virtuosic demands of their musician peers and the general public.
As heard on this recording, Cody brought to his audiences an American musical diversity representative of the times-styles like the ordered marches representing nineteenth century notions of progress in American history, European culture’s continued influence on America. Complementing the show so well, Buffalo Bill’s Famous Cowboy Band reinforced the values of the Wild West show. According to band historians Margaret and Robert Hazen, nineteenth century American bands in general “appealed to the emotions of a people struggling to create an orderly society on a vast and forbidding continent” – a notion that also applies to the Wild West show itself.6Margaret Hindle Hazen and Robert M. Hazen, The Music Men: An Illustrated History of Brass Bands in America, 1800-1920 (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), p. II. By virtuosically playing on their own particular “tools of the trade” a repertoire consisting of orderly music appealing to a wide audience, the Cowboy Band musically exemplified the values of the Americans that filled the Wild West grandstands. Though often performing in the background, the Cowboy Band’s aural contribution to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show enhanced its ability to achieve popularity and cultural influence.
The original Cowboy Band’s playbook of marches, popular and other songs, overtures, and arrangements has not been discovered, but old programs, advertisements, writings, and musical scores provide evidence regarding the music played by the band. This recording provides a sampling of this music. With their own enthusiastic, exciting, nuanced and virtuosic playing, the Americus Brass Band brings to life the energy, effort, cultural implications and quality of Buffalo Bill’s original Famous Cowboy Band.7Portions of this essay were originally published in my article, “Buffalo Bill’s Band,” in the March 1995 issue of The Instrumentalist magazine, Copyright 1995, by The Instrumentalist Company. Reprinted by permission of The Instrumentalist, March 1995.
Michael Lee Masterson (1950 – 2023) was Emeritus Professor of Music at Northwest College in Powell WY. Born on a pig farm in Indiana in 1950, he famously came home from first grade one day declaring his intent to go to college. From Ball State University to Arizona State for his Masters, the University of New Mexico for his PhD, and of course Northwest College for his gainful employment, Mike spent nearly his entire life making music and educating and enriching the lives of others. In 2011 he was recognized by the state of Wyoming with the Governor’s Arts Award, a fitting culmination of his years of service to the arts in the state.
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