Cattle Call – Fiddle Tune a Day – Day 163

Cattle Call brings back fond memories for me. As a kid, we used to visit my Grandparents just about every weekend. My grandpa played guitar, and we would always end up spending time making music when we visited. My dad would play Tenor Banjo and guitar,  and my brother Aaron would play bass. If we could talk him into it, my other brother Adam would sing.

But, that was just the regular family get-togethers. When my Grandpa’s friends came over, things got even more fun, especially Dale Larsen, who was a yodeler (and a bee keeper), and an all-around interesting guy. Cattle Call is one of his favorites to sing (yodel), so we always played it when he came over. I often think about my Grandpa, and what an awesome guy he was. I really do miss having him around.

The Cattle Call From Wikipedia

“The Cattle Call” is a song written and recorded in 1934 by American songwriter and musician Tex Owens[1]. It became a signature song for Eddy Arnold.

Owens wrote the song in Kansas City while watching the snow fall. “Watching the snow, my sympathy went out to cattle everywhere, and I just wished I could call them all around me and break some corn over a wagon wheel and feed them. That’s when the words ‘cattle call’ came to my mind. I picked up my guitar, and in thirty minutes I had wrote the music and four verses to the song,” he said.[2] He recorded it again in 1936.

The song was recorded by Tex Ritter (1947), Carolina Cotton (1951) and Slim Whitman (1954). Whitman’s version peaked at No. 11 on the C&W Best Seller chart.  In 1955, Eddy Arnold recorded his version of the song, which went to No. 1 on the country chart where it stayed for two weeks and a total of 26 weeks on the chart.

Other versions were recorded by Elvis Presley (1970), Gil Trythall (1971), Boxcar Willie (1986), Don Edwards (1992), Emmylou Harris (1992), Skip Gorman (1994), Wylie Gustafson (1994), LeAnn Rimes (1996 with Arnold), and Dwight Yoakam (1998) for the motion picture soundtrack of The Horse Whisperer.[5]