Coyotes is an American
Western song written by
Bob McDill and closely associated with cowboy singer
Don Edwards
William Donlon Edwards (January 6, 1915 – October 1, 2015) was an American politician of the Democratic Party and a member of the United States House of Representatives from California for 32 years in the late 20th century.
Early life
Edwar ...
.
It appears on Edwards' 1993 album ''Goin' Back to Texas'',
and was featured on
the soundtrack of the 2005 documentary film ''
Grizzly Man
''Grizzly Man'' (2005) is an American documentary film by German director Werner Herzog. It chronicles the life and death of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell and the death of his girlfriend Amie Huguenard at Katmai National Park, Alaska. The fi ...
''.
The
Great American Country
Great American Family is an American cable television network. Owned by Great American Media, it broadcasts family-oriented general entertainment programming, including television series and made-for-TV movies.
It was originally established in ...
network named ''Coyotes'' as one of their Top 20 Cowboy and Cowgirl Songs;
Members of the
Western Writers of America
Western Writers of America (WWA), founded 1953, promotes literature, both fictional and nonfictional, pertaining to the American West. Although its founders wrote traditional Western fiction, the more than 600 current members also include histori ...
chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.
In a 2010 interview with ''
Cowboys & Indians'' magazine, Edwards said "Bob McDill wrote the song in 1984 or '85 and couldn't pitch it to anyone. He put it in a drawer in his office and forgot about it until we started recording at Warner Brothers."
The song is a story of what happens to a man when the world as he knows it and worked in it begins to disappear.
Among the things that the
protagonist says "are gone" are nineteenth-century people, animals and concepts that contemporary listeners may not be familiar with:
Pancho Villa
Francisco "Pancho" Villa (, Orozco rebelled in March 1912, both for Madero's continuing failure to enact land reform and because he felt insufficiently rewarded for his role in bringing the new president to power. At the request of Madero's c ...
,
longhorns,
drovers,
Comanches
The Comanche or Nʉmʉnʉʉ ( com, Nʉmʉnʉʉ, "the people") are a Native American tribe from the Southern Plains of the present-day United States. Comanche people today belong to the federally recognized Comanche Nation, headquartered in ...
,
outlaws,
Geronimo,
Sam Bass, the
lion, the
red wolf,
Quantrill (sounds like ''Quantro'' in the song, (one version he says Quanah Parker, who was a Comanche. So what sounds like Quantro may be Quanah) and
Stand Watie. In the end, the protagonist is gone, too.
The song can also be found on the Hinges album by The Matt Poss Band.
The song was one of the records selected by British politician and adventurer,
Rory Stewart
Roderick James Nugent Stewart (born 3 January 1973) is a British academic, diplomat, author, broadcaster, former soldier and former politician. He is the president of GiveDirectly, a visiting fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for ...
, as part of his
Desert Island Discs
''Desert Island Discs'' is a radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29 January 1942.
Each week a guest, called a "castaway" during the programme, is asked to choose eight recordings (usua ...
.
References
{{authority control
1993 songs
Songs written by Bob McDill