July 2, 2009 - When a lot of people think of classic cowboy songs, many think they were written by the likes of Gene Autry and Tex Ritter, Hollywood's "singing cowboys" of yore. True, some of the popular songs were written by people who might not know a cow from a goat, but some actually made the unlikely transition from the cattle trail to popular culture.
One example is the classic trail drive song "Good-bye Old Paint." The man credited with composing the song, Jess Morris, was quick to point out that he did no such thing, that he learned the song from a black cowboy named Charley Willis in about 1885.
Charley Willis was born a slave in Milam County in 1850, and in that capacity worked as a cowboy around Davilla. Details from that point on are sketchy, but we know he rode up the Chisholm Trail to Wyoming with the Snyder Brothers of Georgetown in 1871. He came back to Texas with a lot of stories, and at least one song, when he went to work breaking horses on E.J. Morris' ranch near Bartlett.
E.J. Morris had a 7-year old son named Jesse who Willis taught to play "Good-bye Old Paint" on a Jew's harp. Another black cowboy on the Morris Ranch, Jerry Neely, taught young Jesse how to play fiddle. He later adapted the song to the instrument.
"Charley played a Jews harp and taught me how to play it," Morris recalled later. "It was on this Jews harp that I learned to play 'Old' Paint' at the age of seven. In later years, I learned to play 'Old Paint' on the fiddle, in my own special arrangement -- tuning the fiddle accordingly."
Morris' arrangement of "Good-bye Old Paint" is sophisticated and intricate enough to make some people believe he took formal music lessons somewhere along the line, but Jess Morris always identified himself as just a cowboy fiddler. His unique arrangement caught the attention of folk music collector John Lomax, who included Morris' version of "Good-bye Old Paint" on the historic "Cowboy Songs, Ballads and Cattle Calls From Texas" album.
Jess Morris moved to the Panhandle when he was 12, and worked as a cowboy while still playing fiddle on weekends. An Amarillo newspaper reported that Morris played "Good-bye Old Paint' to great acclaim at a Tri-State fiddle contest in 1928.
Years ago, when researching the origins of the song, another Morris, Artie Morris, who has a strong connection to "Good-bye Old Paint," was discovered. He was related not to Jess Morris, as his surname might suggest, but was Charley Willis' grandson. He grew up in Temple, with a strong affection for cowboy music, though he didn't know at the time that his grandfather might have written an enduring cowboy classic.
"In Temple, you would go into a club, and one club had two stages and two bands," he said. "One stage was where the white musicians played and the other side was where the blacks played, and they couldn't play on the same stage together."
Artie Morris was relegated to one stage, but felt he belonged on another. A decade before Charley Pride became the first African-American superstar of country music, Morris went to Nashville in 1955. Music City gave him a mixed reception. His demo tapes got him in the door, but the door closed quickly when record executives met him in person. One record executive told Morris, "Blacks won't buy it because it's country and country won't buy it because you're black.'"
So he took his songs and his dreams to California where he made a decent living for himself as a recording artist, television host and as a writer for Buck Owens' publishing company. He returned to Texas about 15 years ago and released a 10-song CD of traditional cowboy songs, including "Good-bye Old Paint," which he dedicates to his grandfather.
Western writer and singer Jim Bob Tingle did a lot of the preliminary research into the history of "Good-bye Old Paint" and summed up the process as well as anybody. He wrote, "Credit for saving the song must be given to three Texans: a black cowboy (Willis) who sang it on cattle drives, a cowboy who remembered it (Jess Morris) and a college professor (Lomax) who put it down on paper. "
