Midnight on the Water

The Thomassons may not have made it from nothing. Several writers have noted how close it is to “Old Paint,” a cowboy tune collected in Oklahoma, and it is still argued which came first. The Library of Congress album Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas, collected by John A. Lomax, includes a performance of the “Old Paint” song by Jess Morris with very similar melodic material. Its notes point out that Morris, born in 1878, lived in the Texas Panhandle, as the Thomassons did, and would have been their contemporary.

In the 1970s musicians outside Texas took it up. David Bromberg made it the title track of his 1975 Columbia album, and Jay Ungar and Lyn Hardy recorded it the same year. Mark O’Connor, for whom Benny Thomasson had been a Texas mentor, named his 1998 Sony Classical album after it and recorded it there as a dedication to him. The songwriter Ron Kavana set words to the melody, and Norma Waterson sang his song on Waterson:Carthy’s first album in 1994.