“Hills of Mexico” belongs to a family of Western ballads that folklorists file together under one Roud number, 634. The best-known member, “The Buffalo Skinners,” first appeared in John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910: a crew hired in Jacksboro, Texas, for a buffalo hunt north of the Pease River is cheated and mistreated by the man who hired them, and in the end they kill him. That song is thought to descend from “Canaday-I-O,” a song of lumbermen in a hard winter credited to Ephraim Braley, who worked in the Canadian woods in 1853. Alongside it runs a cowboy branch, indexed as “Boggy Creek or The Hills of Mexico,” in which a group of cowboys is hired for a drive far from home. W. P. Webb collected a version called “Boggus Creek,” published in 1923, in which the hands sign on at the cowtown of Fort Griffin, Texas, to work cattle in New Mexico, and no one is killed.
In the text Ricky Skaggs sings, the narrator is in Fort Worth in 1883 when a Mexican cowboy rides up and offers good wages to anyone who will spend a season in the hills of Mexico. Ten or twelve men sign on, and the trip is pleasant until they cross the river. Then a lightning storm stampedes the cattle, the cactus fills them with thorns and outlaws rob them. They head home by steamboat to ringing bells and whistles, and the narrator promises to tell his friends never to go to that country.
Roscoe Holcomb of Daisy, Kentucky, a coal miner, construction worker and farmer whom John Cohen first recorded in 1959, sang “The Hills of Mexico” on The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward, released by Folkways in 1962. Johnny Cash had cut a version called “New Mexico” at Sun around 1955, unreleased until 1964, and Bob Dylan recorded a variant titled “The Hills of Mexico” during the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions, released in 2014. Ricky Skaggs and Bruce Hornsby recorded it at Skaggs Place Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, for their 2007 album Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby, with Skaggs singing and playing guitar and banjo, Hornsby on piano, Cody Kilby on guitar, Andy Leftwich on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Mark Fain on bass.
