The Streets of Laredo

Arguing that the well-known cowboy ballad The Streets of Laredo is an early expression of discontent with an encroaching modernity, author Jos E. Limn draws upon ethnomusicology, folklore, history, contemporary literature, and other sources to provide a deeply contextualized analysis of the song. He explores its place in the imaginative construction of the American West and its role in the interpretation of both Anglo-American and Mexican American identity in the Texas borderlands and beyond. With the ballad as his point of departure, Limn takes readers on a tour that includes formative experiences from his childhood in Laredo and Corpus Christi; examination of the works of Amrico Paredes, Larry McMurtry, and others; and considerations of American popular music, cinema, baseball, and associated socio-cultural phenomena. The result is a complex and intriguing view of Texas and American culture as seen through the lens of a simple cowboy song. It is my hope, Limn writes in his introduction, that this account of these central figures in Texas historythe ordinary cowboy and this balladwill prove useful as Texas deals with the current and deeply conflicted phase in its long struggle with modernity. The Streets of Laredo: Texas Modernity and Its Discontents offers readers important new perspectives on how society struggles with, understands, and comes to termsor fails to come to termswith the inevitable changes wrought by an evolving culture.