“Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” also known as “The Dying Cowboy,” is a cowboy ballad of the old West. It was adapted from an older sea song, “The Ocean Burial,” written by Edwin Hubbell Chapin and published in 1839; carried west, it became a song of the plains, and John Lomax printed it in his 1910 collection “Cowboy Songs.”
The song gives the last words of a dying cowboy. He begs not to be laid to rest on the open prairie, far from home and kin, in a narrow grave under the endless sky — and the song notes, plainly, that his wish goes unheeded and he is buried there all the same.
The ballad has been recorded across country, folk, and old-time music. The version heard here is by Bruce Molsky.
