The Bard’s Greatest Hit

THE STRANGE BUT TRUE TALE OF A MOURNFUL BALLAD YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW WAS WRITTEN BY BADGER

In 1925, while working slow days for the Hays Cattle Company, an Arizona cowboy named Bill Simon happened upon a copy of Badger Clark’s 1915 book of poems, Sun and Saddle Leather. Simon composed a melody to go with “A Border Affair” and turned the poem into a popular campfire singalong. Before long, it had become a fixture in the folk canon:

Nights when she knew where I’d ride

She would listen for my spurs,

Fling the big door open wide,

Raise them laughin’ eyes of hers

And my heart would nigh stop beatin’

When I heard her tender greetin’,

Whispered soft for me alone—

“Mi amor! mi corazón!”

1958 RICHARD DYER-BENNET

The English-born musician collected European and American folk songs, and not only performed them but sought to preserve them in his recordings. On his 1958 album, alongside such numbers as “Greensleeves” and “John Henry,” Dyer-Bennet recorded “A Border Affair” under the soon-to-be popular title “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue.”

1960 PETE SEEGER

The legendary folk singer nestled “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue” in a gentle medley of American ballads on his 1960 album The Rainbow Quest. Seeger’s plain-spoken delivery and tender picking on the banjo underline the song’s touching nostalgia for a lost lover.

1963 IAN & SYLVIA

A year before they married, the famed Canadian folk duo Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker recorded “Spanish Is a Loving Tongue” on their album Four Strong Winds; the lyrics’ cowboy spirit may have particularly spurred the interest of Tyson, a former rodeo rider.

1971 BOB DYLAN

The Nobel Prize winner issued “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue” as the B-side to “Watching the River Flow.” Five other versions followed, including a scintillating 1975 live performance, at the height of the singer’s fascination with the southern border.