Ghost Riders in the Sky

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Ghost Riders in the Sky
Written by Stan Jones, 1948

There’s something about this song that makes a room go quiet, even before the chorus rolls in like distant thunder. It sounds like a legend passed down around a campfire for a hundred years, but it was written in 1948 by one man, Stan Jones. And he was an Arizona boy, born in 1914 in Douglas, down near the Mexican border.

Jones grew up around ranch country and cowboys. By his own account, the song came from a story an old cowhand told him when he was about twelve. The two were watching a storm build over the desert, and the old man pointed to the clouds and described phantom cowboys, doomed to chase a herd of fiery-eyed cattle across the sky forever. Any rider still on earth who saw them, the old man said, had best take it as a warning to mend his ways. Young Stan never forgot it.

Years later, after serving in the Navy during the Second World War, Jones was working as a park ranger in Death Valley. He had never taken songwriting very seriously, but he remembered that old tale and set it to a haunting, galloping melody. When Hollywood film crews came to Death Valley to shoot Westerns, Jones got to know some of the people involved, and his songs began to find their way to the right ears. It’s a lovely picture: a ranger in the hot desert, with a head full of songs and nobody quite knowing it yet.

The song was published in 1949, and suddenly everyone wanted it. Burl Ives recorded it first, but the big hit belonged to bandleader Vaughn Monroe, whose deep, booming voice seemed made for it. His version went all the way to number one and stayed there for many weeks. Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and Peggy Lee all recorded it that same year, and it became one of the best-loved songs of 1949. Jones went on to write songs for several John Ford Westerns, including the title song for The Searchers, and he even did some acting before he died in 1963, still a young man at forty-eight.

Johnny Cash brought the song back to life in 1979, thirty years after it was first a hit. He recorded it for his album Silver, which marked his twenty-fifth year in music. His plainspoken, weathered delivery gave the old legend a new kind of gravity, and his single climbed to number two on the country charts. For many listeners, his is now the version they hear in their heads.

Since then, the song has been recorded hundreds of times, by country singers, rock bands, surf-guitar groups, and orchestras. The Outlaws took a hard-driving rock version onto the pop charts in 1980. Western music historians regularly rank it among the greatest cowboy songs ever written. That is quite a legacy for a campfire story told to a twelve-year-old boy under an Arizona sky.