WRITING OLD PAINT
By Clay Coppedge

Identifying who actually penned the classic trail drive song "Goodbye Old Paint" is about as easy as trying to figure out which horse on which cattle drive inspired the song.

The man most often credited as composer of the song, Jess Morris, never claimed to have written. it. He said he learned it from a black cowboy named Charley Willis in about 1885. The song was probably credited to Jess Morris because of the unique way he tuned his fiddle for the song.

Charley Willis would seem, on the surface of history, to be an unlikely candidate to have written an enduring cowboy classic. He was born a slave in Milam County in 1850 and learned the cowboy trade as a slave.

In 1871 he signed on with the Snyder Brothers of Georgetown to take several thousand cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Wyoming in 1871. We can assume it was a seminal event in his life. Willis returned to Davilla and went to work on E.J. Morris' ranch near Bartlett where his specialty was breaking horses.

The Morris Ranch is where he taught E.J. Morris' seven-year old son, Jesse, how to play "Goodbye Old Paint" in about 1885. Jess Morris' first fiddle lesson came from another black cowboy on the ranch, Jerry Neely, about the same time.

"Charley played a jews-harp and taught me how to play it," Morris said. "It was on this jews-harp that I learned to play 'Old' Paint' at the age of seven. In later years I learned to play 'Old Paint' on the fiddle, in my own special arrangement - tuning the fiddle accordingly."

Fiddlers recognize Morris' arrangement as sophisticated and difficult, adding credence to rumors that he studied violin in Austin and at Valparaiso, Indiana. But Jess Morris always identified himself as a cowboy fiddler.

His unique "Old Paint" arrangement caught the attention of folk music collector John Lomax, who said that Morris had "the best tune that exists to Goodbye, Old Paint" and he wanted to record it as Morris performed it. That version is included on the seminal "Cowboy Songs, Ballads and Cattle Calls From Texas" album.

The song, which by now had been around for decades, became an instant classic. Other versions of the song soon surfaced, all of them "original compositions."

"Many publishers swiped my song and had it published, and many old maverick 'Paints' were running wild and unbranded," Morris later noted

Jess Morris took the song with him from his hometown of Bartlett, Texas to the Panhandle, where he was known as a good ranch hand as well as a superb fiddler. An Amarillo newspaper first identified Jess Morris with "Good-bye Old Paint" in 1928 when Morris performed it at a tri-state fiddle contest.
"The audience forgot all dignity and joined in a hearty yell on 'Goodbye Old Paint,'" the paper reported.

Meanwhile, back in Central Texas, Charley Willis' grandson was growing up in Temple with a strange yearning to write and sing cowboy songs. Perhaps ironically, his name is also Morris - Artie Morris.  Artie Morris soon found out that country musicians in his hometown were less than enthusiastic about his dream of singing cowboy songs.

"In Temple you would go into a club, and one club had two stages and two bands," he said. "One stage was where the white musicians played and the other side was where the blacks played and they couldn't play on the same stage together."

He went to Nashville in 1955, a decade before Charley Pride became the first black superstar of country music. Doors opened when record executives heard his tapes, but closed just as quickly when he showed up in person. One record executive told him, "Blacks won't buy it because it's country and country won't buy it because you're black.'"

Like a lot of other dreamers, he lit out for California. He stayed there for 30 years, working as a television host, a recording artist for Adkorp Records and, for seven years, as a writer for Buck Owens' publishing company.

He returned home to Texas a little more than 10 years ago and released a 10-song CD featuring traditional cowboy songs, including "Good-bye Old Paint." He said he tried to put himself in the mindset of his great grandfather, on a 2,000-mile trail drive up the Chisholm Trail.

"I always wanted to be a cowboy, but I was afraid of cows, so I thought it was best to sing about it," he says.

Western writer and singer Jim Bob Tingle believes there is enough credit to go around for "Good-bye Old Paint." He wrote, "Credit for saving the song must be given to three Texans: a black cowboy (Willis) who sang it on cattle drives, a cowboy who remembered it (Jess Morris) and a college professor (Lomax) who put it down on paper. "

Leave it to a man named Jim Bob to get it right.