Collector and performer of cowboy songs, author of a book on cowboy-song origins.
White was born into a musical family in Washington, DC. In 1924 he summered in
Arizona, where he met Wickenburg dude rancher and cowboy singer Romaine
Loudermilk. Inspired by Loudermilk, White learned the rudiments of guitar playing and
acquired a taste for cowboy songs. In 1926, while attending graduate school at Columbia
University in New York City, he landed a weekly, nonpaying, fifteen-minute radio spot
singing cowboy songs on WEAF. In 1929 he published a song folio, and between 1929
and 1931 he recorded twenty songs, five of them cowboy songs. From 1930 until 1936
White appeared as the Lonesome Cowboy in the weekly Death Valley Days program. In
1936, he left radio in order to pursue his career as a mapmaker.
Retiring from that career in 1965, White returned to the extensive files on cowboy
songs and their authors that he had compiled during his years as a singer of cowboy
songs. Soon he began to write articles on D.J.O’Malley, Gail Gardner, Will Barnes, and
other cowboy poets and songwriters. These articles and other essays were later gathered
into book form and published by the University of Illinois Press in 1975 as Git
AlongLittle Dogies: Songs and Songmakers of the American West. It has proven to be one
of the best books written on the origins of cowboy and Western songs.
White occasionally lectured and performed in his later years. His collections were
donated to Utah State University in Logan, Utah.
James S.Griffith