Carl Sandburg sings "I Ride an Old Paint"

From his album, "Flat Rock Ballads", here is Carl Sandburg singing "I Ride an Old Paint" and accompanying himself on the guitar. The poet was near eighty at the time of this recording. He wrote of this song, that it "came from Margaret Larkin, then of Las vegas, New Mexico, and Lynn Riggs, the poet and playwright who "Green Grow the Lilacs" was bought by Rodgers and Hammerstein and made into the musical and movie "Oklahoma!" They heard this song at Santa Fe from a buckaroo who was last seen heading from Tucson and El Paso. The song smells of saddle leather, sketches ponies and landscapes, and varies in theme from a realistic presentation of the drab Bill Jones and his violent wife to an ethereal prayer and cry of phantom tone. There is rich poetry in the image of the rider so loving a horse he begs when he dies his bones shall be tied to his horse and the two of them sent wandering with their faces turned west."

Here is a link to the complete album:
   • Carl Sandburg's "Flat Rock Ballads"  

President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."