“Diamond Joe” was written in 1944 by Baldwin “Butch” Hawes, a musician who played with the Almanac Singers at various times, for The Chisholm Trail, a radio program made for the BBC in New York. Elizabeth Lomax scripted the program and Alan Lomax chose the music. One of its main characters was a tough cattleman called Diamond Joe, drawn from an older song of that name in the Lomaxes’ book Our Singing Country. When the program’s music director, Bess Lomax Hawes, found that the older song was a slow waltz that did not suit the barroom scene it was meant for, she asked her husband to write a new one. He set it to the tune of “The State of Arkansas,” a number in the repertoire of Lee Hays, who was to sing it on the show. The program announced its songs as traditional, and Hawes received no credit on the air.
Cisco Houston, a member of the cast, recorded it in 1952 for Folkways on Cowboy Ballads (FA 2022), and Hawes’s son has written that his version matches the one in the show’s script and that later versions are all based on it. Houston’s words were printed in Sing Out! in 1954. A rodeo cowboy named George Williams, who had learned the song from Houston’s record, taught it to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at a rodeo in Brussels in 1958. Elliott, Bob Dylan, Ian Tyson, James Taylor and Joe Val are among those who have recorded it, and Val’s recording took it into bluegrass.
The song is a hired hand’s complaint about a Texas cattleman. Diamond Joe has large holdings, carries his money with him and pays little attention to the law, but treats the men who work for him badly: the horses he hands out are too old to stand, the food is poor, and he never stops talking and telling lies. The narrator has tried three times to quit, and each time Joe has talked him out of it; his last wish is to leave his employer nothing but his fleas. Sam Bush included it on Circles Around Me (Sugar Hill, October 2009). It is a different song from the river shanty also called “Diamond Joe,” which has a chorus.
