Brewster Higley VI, Lyricist of "Home on the Range"
Brewster Martin Higley VI (November 30, 1823 - December 9, 1911) was an otolaryngologist who became famous for writing "The Western Home." This poem, originally written in 1872 and published under the title "Oh, Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam" in the Smith County Pioneer in 1873, would be set to music to become the lyrics for the famous American folksong "Home on the Range."
Because Higley wrote "The Western Home" while living in Smith County, Kansas, and because they felt it described their state very well, the Kansas legislature voted to make "Home on the Range" the official state song on April 8, 1947. By the time he died in 1911, the rest of the country had little idea of the song's true origins. Higley settled in Kansas in 1871, on a small plot of land. Though he had made a living as a physician in Indiana, he came to Kansas to stake a claim as part of the Homestead Act of 1862.
National Public Radio’s Steve Lickteig reported for Morning Edition that Higley's plot, on which his cabin still stands, probably looks much the same as it did some 130 years ago. The blue skies, endless prairie, and abundant wildlife inspired Higley, who wrote the original poem, "My Western Home," in the fall of 1872 without intending it for an audience.
Oh, give me a home,
Where the buffalo roam,
And the deer and the antelope play,
Where never is heard a discouraging word,
And the sky is not clouded all day.
A local man named Trube Reese found the poem while visiting Higley's cabin and convinced him to turn it into a song. Higley got fiddler Dan Kelley to help him set the poem to music. Higley's fellow homesteaders took an immediate liking to the result.
"I think the big appeal of the song is there's a longing for a fairer place and for home at the same time for all these settlers," says Tom Averill, a Kansas scholar and writer (and Craig Parker's college roommate at the University of Kansas)..
The song quickly took on a life all its own. Due in part to the settlers passing through the territory, and cowboys constantly on the move, "Home on the Range" spread across the country.
"Everybody changed the words to suit the place they were from. So it became 'My Colorado Home' and 'My Arizona Home,'" Averill says. "The fact that Dr. Brewster Higley wrote it and the fact that Dan Kelley set it to music was completely lost probably within four, five or six years." Some of the modifications stuck, and changed the song forever. The words, "home on the range" never appear in Higley's original lyrics.
Averill explains, "His line is: 'I would not exchange my home here to range forever in azure so bright.' In other words, it's a verb. I wouldn't range anywhere else. And then the cowboys get it, and you know how cowboys like to sing about home. It's the most rootless job you can have. And they're thinking about a home on the range."
When Texas singer Vernon Dalhardt made the first commercial recording of the song, it was a hit and several other singers recorded the tune over the yeas. President Franklin Roosevelt even declared it his favorite song in 1932. By 1935, "Home on the Range" was everywhere.
People identified with the personalized versions the same way they felt attached to their own homesteads. Some may have identified so strongly that they felt they themselves had created it. In 1935, a couple in Arizona filed suit against NBC Radio and several publishing companies. The couple claimed they had written the song 30 years earlier. The song was yanked from the airwaves.
One of the defendants hired a lawyer to confirm the song's origins. He traveled through every state west of the Mississippi until a tip led him to Kansas, specifically to the Kirwin Chief, a Kansas newspaper. In an 1876 edition, he found a copy of Higley's original poem "My Western Home" with words that closely matched the lyrics to "Home on the Range." That discovery closed the case. Brewster Higley was now officially the song's author. And it went back on the radio.
Higley's song is still popular today, serving as the state song of Kansas and as an immediately recognizable slice of American folk music.Karen Panter, who takes care of the cabin that still stands on the site where Higley first wrote his famous words, says that this probably would surprise the doctor.
"He probably thought he hadn't anything special written down," she says. "It was just something he was thinking through at the time when he was sitting there."
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Higley's lyrics as the song are immediately below. Farther down below is the complete original Higley poem.
Home on the Range
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
How often at night where the heavens are bright
With the light of the glittering stars
Have I stood there amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of ours
Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
Then give me a land where the bright diamond sand
Flows leisurely down to the stream
Where the graceful white swan goes gliding along
Like a maid in a heavenly dream
Oh I would not exchange my old home on the range
Where the deer and the antelop play
Where the seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
The Western Home, a poem by Brewster Martin Higley VI
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Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play;
Where never is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.
Oh, give me the gale of the Solomon vale
Where life streams with buoyancy flow,
On the banks of the Beaver, where seldom if ever
Any poisonous herbage doth grow.
Oh, give me the land where the bright diamond sand
Throws light from the glittering stream;
Where glideth along the graceful white swan,
Like a maid in her heavenly dreams.
I love these wild flowers in this bright land of our;
I love, too, the curlew's wild scream.
The bluffs of white rocks and antelope flocks
That graze on the hillsides so green.
How often at night, when the heavens are bright
By the light of the glittering stars,
Have I stood there amazed and asked as I gazed
If their beauty exceeds this of ours.
The air is so pure, the breezes so light,
The zephyrs so balmy at night,
I would not exchange my home here to range
Forever in azure so bright.
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