October 2025: Panhandle Prairie

Submitted by Joel Mabus

The song is my own version of a very old ballad that shows up in history. Folklorists might tag it as a variant of “The Unfortunate Rake,” which is the name of an early broadside ballad. Other songs in the catalog would include: “St. James Infirmary (or Hospital),” “The Dying Crapshooter’s Last Request,” “Streets of Laredo,” and “The Dying Cowboy”—or simply “Dead Cowboy.”

I like to think of it as a great ghost story. My setting is the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930’s—though I don’t say that explicitly. Many from Appalachia resettled in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, looking for easy riches in the 1920’s by busting up the thick prairie sod with iron plows—only to be blown away with the wind and dust storms of the 1930’s.

Listen to Joel’s recording of “Panhandle Prairie:” 

Lyrics

© Joel Mabus, 2013
as sung on his album, Pepper’s Ghost and Other Banjo Visitations

I was drinking one night in a panhandle barroom
Stepping outside for a change in the air
I spied a tall figure all wrapped in white linen
With cold gray eyes and raven black hair

He shot me a glance and a shiver run through me
With a chill to the bone that hangs on me yet
He labored one breath and then drew another
And the words that he spoke I will never forget

He said I traded my home way back in the mountains
For the smell of cheap whiskey and a harlot’s perfume
And I gambled my life on the panhandle prairie
Got shot in the breast, now death is my doom

Go write me a letter, to my gray headed mother
She’ll tell the news to my sister so dear
But there is another, more dear than my mother
Don’t tell her I died a drunkard out here

Take a pearl handled pistol to nail up my coffin
Read God’s holy word, and sing a sad song
Then bury me deep in the panhandle prairie
Where the buffalo grass can feed on my bones

I asked for his name, but he gave me no answer
I pressed him once more and he made this reply
The wind tells my name when it blows on the prairie
It moans and it whispers, it screams and it cries

Just then the west wind blew hard on the prairie
And a devil of dust spun up in the air
I wiped out my eyes, but I never could find him
That pale dead man with the raven black hair

Joel Mabus is a songwriter, folksinger, instrumentalist and music teacher living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Genealogical records show he is the scion of William Brewster of Scrooby, England and Plymouth, Massachusetts. Also the scion of a thousand anonymous potato farmers, barrel makers, and free thinkers from the German lowlands and Scottish highlands. His mom and dad toured the Midwest in the 1930s playing hillbilly music on fiddle & banjo. (That is how he got this way.) He has recorded 27 albums since 1978; his latest is titled Lonesome Road.