A former singing cowboy himself, John I. White spent decades compiling information on cowboy and western songs and the artists, songwriters, and others attached to them. He also sought out and corresponded with a who's who of the genre, people like Badger Clark, Curley Fletcher, D. J. O'Malley, Romaine Lowdermilk, Will Barnes, Joseph Mills Hanson, and Owen Wister.
 
In Git Along, Little Dogies, White draws on old friendships and his exhaustive files to bring readers the untold story of cowboy and western song. Wonderful anecdotes stand beside White's trademark attention to detail as he painstakingly establishes the time, place, and circumstance behind each song's origin and places the music within the evolution of popular song. He also looks at how radio and recording affected the genre and shows how the music crisscrossed with pop music but also with folk and the traditional Anglo-Irish tradition.
 
From "Whoopee Ti Yi Yo" to "Ten Thousand Cattle Straying," Git Along, Little Dogies ventures from cow camps to saloons to big-city radio studios as it lassos a vivid piece of American music history. 
 

Ah, the Wild West! Wide open plains, beautiful sunsets, and thundering herds. Days when the cowboy was king, and good guys always wore white. The love affair with the American West has stood the test of time and survived competition from sports, electronic gadgets, and reality.

Wanted Dead or Alive presents the first-ever comprehensive look at how the American West has been depicted in popular culture. Following Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the birth and growth of the pop culture West in the context of American history, noted experts explore developments in popular Western fiction, major forms of live Western entertainment, trends in Western movies and television shows, images of the West in popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and advertising. For the reader on the trail of even more information, each section of the book concludes with suggestions for further reading.