Doughbelly Price
In the spring of 1959, when I was aged 9, while on a vacation in Taos, NM, my parents took me along to see a local real estate agent and professional "character" named Doughbelly Price. Price had been a chuckwagon cook and rodeo cowboy in his youth not long after the turn of the century, and had settled down in Taos to sell real estate and tell stories, some of which wound up in columns in the local newspaper and were eventually collected into books. He was a scrappy little bantam of a man, and I retained a vivid memory of him. His fame beyond Taos began in 1949 when Life magazine ran a profile of him.
Doughbelly died on 8 June 1963. There was a news report in The New Mexican on 10 June, an editorial on the 11th, and a news report about his funeral on the 12th.
Doughbelly's Literary Oeuvre
Doughbelly produced at least one (and I believe more than one) self-published collection of his columns from local newspapers, the Taos News and El Crepusculo. One of those, doughBelly's sCrap Book, bears the legend "Printed by El Crepusculo, 1951" and the following distinctive copyright statement:
I trust and hope that all of Doughbelly's words contained on and though this page are presented in full compliance with the principles he enunciated and since there is unlikely to be any profit, I do not need to inquire into the matter of sending him his Cut these 33 years after his passing.
A similar booklet was Doughbelly's Wisdom and Insanity, published in Taos in 1954. He also wrote an autobiography (Short Stirrups: The Saga of Doughbelly Price (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1960), and the western novelist of that day, Frank O'Rourke, published a "novel" called The Diamond Hitch (New York: William Morrow, 1956), with a dedication which reads: "to my friend DOUGHBELLY PRICE who lived this book"; I own one copy and have seen another autographed by both O'Rourke and Doughbelly. The main character in that novel is named "Dewey Jones," which has an unsettling effect on me as I read it, inasmuch as I can recall on a family trip in 1961 our eating at a restaurant in Lordsburg NM, which I could swear was called "Dewey Jones's" and which stood ever after in our family legendary as the most godawful place we ever ate. Lordsburg is in the far southwestern corner of the state, well away from Taos (a point befuddled by John Ford having the passengers in Stagecoach go from Tombstone to Lordsburg by way of Monument Valley, hundreds of miles to the north of either), so any connection would be hard to establish, and I may have the name of the restaurant incorrect.
At all events, I hope to find opportunity to incorporate some or all of Doughbelly's prose on this WWW site eventually. If any reader knows of additional books/booklets published by Doughbelly, I would be glad for information. I have searched for his literary remains on two trips to Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque, and what I report above is what I have been able to find in the libraries, archives, and second-hand bookstores of those towns.
Doughbelly sings, and speaks
In 1950, an ethnomusicologist at the University of New Mexico went around collecting recordings of authentic western songs, and included a raft of Doughbelly's songs and stories. Here are the complete recordings, from the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music, maintained in the Center for Southwest Research of the General Library, University of New Mexico. (I am grateful to Monique Durham of the Center for assistance in locating and preserving these recordings.)
- Murphy's Ranch: "learned about 40 or 45 years ago" -- J.D. Robb appended a note on this song to the archive records.
- Santa Fe Trail: "learned 42 years ago. Learned on Cross L outfit below Folsom."
- Recollection of Jail: "I said, 'You didn't say what you were arrested for.' He said, 'No, and by God I ain't goin' to either.'"
- Further Recollections
Another set of recordings was made in Taos on 27 April, 1952. These songs may be found in one of the collections of American folk songs published by Alan Lomax:
- A Cow Camp on the Range
- A Prisoner for Life: Doughbelly said he learned this in jail in Montag, Texas.
- About Joe Barnes
- Days of Forty-Nine: "That's one Jules Alleac used to sing. 'He was kind of a bum and a cowboy and a guitar picker and a good one too.'"
- Sam Bass
- About Sam Bass
Fame is Fleeting
I caught only the vaguest flicker of a memory of Doughbelly's name among people I spoke to in Taos, and that from the editor of a newspaper for which he wrote. Second-hand bookshops draw a complete blank (copies of his works I have found come from Santa Fe shops). The formal memory that I can trace had already made it, in the Taos home page, onto the WWW ahead of this page, in this homey advice:
A convenience store in Bentonville, Arkansas, bears Doughbelly's name and is available for sale.