The Catalog
300 Years of Outlaws in America: Pirates to Prohibition
Explore the stories behind the songs. Outlaw ballads, Wild West songs, cowboy songs, pirate songs, prohibition songs and frontier music: outlaws, lawmen, women of the West, native voices, and the whole Tombstone saga. Every song original, every story true, free to play.
All ballads
Goin' Once
An auctioneer's rapid-fire chant rolling across a dusty stockyard as prize cattle change hands to the highest bidder.
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Curly Bill's Reign of Fear
Curly Bill Brocius ruled the Cochise County rustlers by fear, until Wyatt Earp's shotgun found him at Iron Springs.
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Morgan's Last Stand
Morgan Earp took a bullet through a billiard-hall door in Tombstone, and his brother spent the next year answering for it.
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Tombstone's Fearless Pair
Texas Jack Vermillion and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson rode the vendetta beside Wyatt Earp and asked for nothing in return.
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The Ballad of Big Nose Kate
Mary Katharine Harony set a fire to break Doc Holliday out of a Texas jail, and outlived him by more than fifty years.
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Lozen, Shield of the People
Lozen rode with Victorio and Geronimo as both warrior and seer, and the Apache believed no bullet could find her.
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Hardcore Elk Hunter
Dark timber before daylight, wet boots, and a bull bugling one ridge over. The whole season in one song.
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Ride Like the Midnight Flame
Paul Revere rode out of Boston in the dark with the regulars on the move and a whole countryside left to wake.
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Walker's Creek
Jack Hays and fourteen Rangers met a Comanche war party at Walker's Creek with Colt revolvers, and warfare on horseback changed.
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The Ballad of Etta Place
Etta Place rode to Argentina with Butch and Sundance, sat for one photograph in New York, and vanished from the record entirely.
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Stagecoach Mary
Mary Fields, six feet tall and born enslaved, drove the U.S. mail through Montana snow with a shotgun and never lost a run.
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Run Out of Coast
Blackbeard cornered in the shallows at Ocracoke, where the inlet ran out and Maynard's men came over the rail.
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Medal for a Scout
Buffalo Bill Cody earned the Medal of Honor scouting on the Platte, and the Army took it back thirty years later on a technicality.
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The General Rides at Dawn
General Washington crossed the ice at midnight with a beaten army, and had the war turned back around by morning.
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The Cowgirl Who Shook the West
Lucille Mulhall roped steers from horseback in front of thousands, and Teddy Roosevelt himself called her the first cowgirl.
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Hormones and Attitude
One single mother, three young kids, and no quarter given: the loudest house on the block and the toughest.
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The Ballad of Johnny Ringo
Johnny Ringo was found dead in a tree fork in West Turkey Creek with his boots off, and no one has ever agreed who put him there.
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Grant Johnson, Quiet Hand
Grant Johnson policed Indian Territory alongside Bass Reeves with a quiet hand, a long memory and no need for the credit.
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Happily Heartbroke, Pour Me One More Empty Glass
A honky-tonk send-up of every broken-hearted country song ever written. Pour one more empty glass and cry along.
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Gunfight at O.K. Corral
Thirty seconds in a narrow Tombstone lot, thirty shots fired, three men dead, and a legend that outlived every one of them.
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Badonkadonk Bronc
A cowboy behind the chutes tries his best pickup line on a cowgirl drawn in the second go. She rides the bronc, takes the pot, and he carries her saddle.
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Seven Minutes in Mexico
Bill Pickett took a Mexico City bull ring for seven minutes with the crowd hurling bottles, and won the bet anyway.
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Doc's Last Grin
A tubercular dentist with a gambler's nerve, Doc Holliday died in a Colorado bed with his boots off, and saw the joke in it.
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Nag Nag Nag
A country-rock duet that takes apart a long marriage worn down by miscommunication - the husband remembering how sweet it started, the wife answering with the lists he never reads. Call-and-response vocals, overdriven guitars, and a hook built to be shouted back.
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Run of the River
A day on Colorado's Western Slope, reading seams and mending line while the river runs on without you.
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The Outlaw Son
A Utah rancher's boy named Robert Parker took the name Butch Cassidy, and rode out of his father's world for good.
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Wyatt's Fire on Fremont Street
Wyatt Earp walked down Fremont Street into the most famous half-minute in the West, and walked out the only man untouched.
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The Ballad of Belle Starr
Belle Starr rode Indian Territory in velvet and pistols as the Bandit Queen, until a shotgun ended her on a lonely road.
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Cody's Road
Scout, hunter, showman: Buffalo Bill Cody sold the West back to the world and became the biggest star alive doing it.
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The Badge of Virgil Earp
Virgil Earp wore the marshal's badge at Tombstone, took an ambush that cost him the use of an arm, and never handed it back.
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Brothers in Bond
Legend gave Doc Holliday a brother from Mexico: no papers, no court, just two men who called each other family.
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Where the Good Men Gone
A woman in 1890 with a straight back, a good piece of ground, and not one man worth marrying inside a hundred miles.
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Mike the Headless Chicken
Fruita, Colorado, 1945: a rooster met the axe, kept right on living, and spent eighteen months as a travelling sideshow.
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This is Norco
No sidewalks, just horse trails. A present-day portrait of Norco, California, where the freeway rushes past and the town rides on.
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The Ballad of Doc Susie
Dr. Susan Anderson came to Fraser, Colorado expecting to die of tuberculosis, and stayed fifty years doctoring the whole valley.
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Buffalo Calf Road Woman
Buffalo Calf Road Woman rode into the fire at the Rosebud to save her brother, and the Cheyenne named the whole battle for her.
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Sadie & Josie's Trail
Josephine Marcus came to Tombstone on one man's arm and left on Wyatt Earp's, riding out the next fifty years beside him.
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Never Been Throwed
The machine can hit the note, but it has never sat a horse or slept cold. A country waltz about writing songs with AI, and about who still has to catch it when it lies.
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Just 18 During the Civil War
Eighteen years old and already a scout, Will Cody rode the Civil War's western edge with the Kansas cavalry.
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Old Dogs & Old Trucks
Both of them rattle, neither one quits, and you wouldn't trade either for anything with a warranty.
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Pearl Hart and the Last Stage
Pearl Hart robbed the last stagecoach in Arizona, was caught three days later, and turned the whole mess into fame.
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The Night They Stole the Deadwood Gold
A Deadwood coach running heavy with gold, a stand of timber, and men who had been waiting there all week.
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Boardwalk Boss
Nucky Johnson ran Atlantic City's boardwalk, its votes and its liquor, and made Prohibition pay for thirty straight years.
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Forty-Niners Dream
The forty-niners left everything they loved for a river in California and a season that made almost none of them rich.
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Geronimo's Last Ride
Geronimo held the Sierra Madre with a handful of Apache warriors against two nations, and died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill.
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Teddy the Cattleman
Before the White House, a grieving Theodore Roosevelt went west to run cattle in the Dakota Badlands and came back another man.
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Skinny Water Gold
Sight-fishing for redfish on the flats outside Corpus Christi: poling skinny water at sunrise, waiting on a copper tail and one clean cast.
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Clanton's Curse
Ike Clanton talked his way into the fight at the O.K. Corral, then ran from it unarmed, and outlived nearly every man who stood.
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Texas Jack Vermillion, The Outlaw's Ride
They called him Texas Jack Vermillion, and he rode the vendetta trail with a dead horse under him and a pistol still working.
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The Ballad of Bass Reeves
Born into slavery, Bass Reeves became a deputy U.S. marshal in Indian Territory and brought in more than three thousand outlaws.
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The Pink Gown
Pearl de Vere ran the finest parlor house in Cripple Creek, died after her own ball in 1897, and was buried in the pink Paris gown by a stranger who paid for the funeral. A frontier waltz in D minor.
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Big Al in the Windy City
Al Capone ran Chicago on beer, bribes and fear through all of Prohibition, and fell to a tax charge, not a bullet.
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Turkey Creek Rambler
Turkey Creek Jack Johnson drifted into the Earp posse out of nowhere, and drifted back out of the record the same way.
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Pardon Won't Hold
Jean Lafitte took the President's pardon at New Orleans, then sailed for Galveston and went right back to the account.
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Ena of the Plains
Ena Palmer rode the Nebraska frontier alone with a rifle and a good horse, and left behind a diary nobody expected.
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Sherman McMaster's Ballad
Sherman McMaster rode with the rustlers before he rode with the Earps, and picked his side on the day it cost him something.
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Voice of the Paiute Wind
Sarah Winnemucca carried the Paiute case to Washington in her own voice, and wrote the first book published by a Native woman.
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Luck of Lucania
Charlie Luciano turned the American underworld into a business, and ran it from a prison cell and an exile's balcony.
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The Ballad of Calamity Jane
Martha Jane Canary drank, swore, scouted and nursed smallpox miners, and asked only to be buried beside Wild Bill.
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Thunder Still Remains
Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce on a 1,170-mile retreat in 1877 and surrendered at Bear Paw, 40 miles short of Canada, promising he would fight no more forever.
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Little Sure Shot
Annie Oakley out-shot every man Buffalo Bill could put in front of her, and Sitting Bull himself gave her the name.
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Fought Like a Man
Anne Bonny in her own voice, Ireland to Nassau to the deck off Jamaica, where two women stood and fought while the crew hid below.
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Centauro del Norte
Pancho Villa rode the Mexican Revolution from cattle thief to general, and took the fight across the American line.
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Black Bart Walked
Black Bart robbed twenty-eight Wells Fargo coaches on foot and unarmed, leaving poems behind, until a laundry mark caught him.
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Scarlet in the Dust
Julia Bulette nursed Virginia City through its fevers, and the same town that wouldn't seat her in daylight buried her like a queen.
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Rich Enough to Drown
Black Sam Bellamy took the Whydah and a fortune with her, then lost ship, crew and treasure to a Cape Cod storm.
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Ridin' for the Mail
At fourteen, Will Cody carried the mail across country that had already killed grown men, and kept the schedule.
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Turn the Rock
A morning on the river: turn the rock, match the hatch, and read the water like scripture.
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