Only once before have I presumed to “write a song.” I use scare quotes because I’ve really no idea how it’s done. This latest go-round involves new lyrics for an existing tune. I posted the first version here, and have since added a coda. The last line of the posted version is changed to:

Old roan horse, she’ll lead me to you. (versus Old roan horse, she’ll know what to do.)

I had rejected the “lead me” line earlier, feeling it was implausible on top of sentimental, too close to Disney. Horses return to where they’re fed, and they don’t play Lassie. But here’s the thing: Whereas sentimentality pollutes poetry, it sits pretty in songs. Songs are not poems, nor poems songs (in my view).

The coda is a fourth stanza with a diverging rhyme scheme (AABB) sung with melodic variation. Reprising certain imagery, then invoking redundantly the bondedness of the humans to each other and to the beast, makes the story arc feel more complete:

We’ll tarry a spell where the shadows grow long,
Lay us down softly in mourning dove song,
Then the old roan horse will carry us two,
The two of us home on her back, me and you.

An interesting trait of songs is their affinity with nonstandard grammar. She don’t, he don’t or it don’t often fits a country-western song’s rhythm and spirit better than “doesn’t.” The same is true with “ain’t” versus “isn’t” or “aren’t.” Songs are amenable to nonstandard or antiquated usage. I was aware of using beat-driven idiom in previous stanzas of the “Roan” lyrics:

A sip of sweet water is nought but her due
…
The ranchwoman gazes where last she did see
Her good man a-mounted set out for Old Blue

We embrace old-timey, emotive, even mawdlin language in minstrelsy and balladry which we would find distracting in other contexts. 

So in my lyrics, the cattleman’s horse has wandered home riderless. The ranchwoman mounts it and rides to where her husband lies in some disabled state. Maybe she splints his injured ankle and the two return home double mounted. Maybe she finds him dead from a rattler’s bite, and returns with his body draped across the saddle. Perhaps, in grieving over his corpse in cottonwood umbrage at creekside, enveloped in the lonesome plaint of mourning doves, she herself expires, plumb heartbroke, and the two of them go dearly departed, spirit-wise, into the cosmic by-and-by, transported on the back of an astral roan. It could happen — it’s a song!

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