Frontiers

Bob Nolan
Original copyright: September 24, 1985

Where are the buckskin riders,
Red men, bad men, law abiders?
Where the rumbling wheels of wagons rolling?
Where the cry of “Westward Ho” a-tolling one more frontier?
Gone are the six-guns blazing,
Endless herds of bison grazing.
Gone but not forgotten nor forsaken.
Lo, behold the wonders of their making--one more frontier.
Where are their spirits riding now?
Gone to a new frontier.
Somewhere a falling star tumbling from a world afar
Marks their lonely grave.
And though it grieve us, glory to they who died to leave us
One more frontier.
One more frontier.

"Frontiers" was registered for copyright on September 24 1985 by Bob Nolan's daughter, Roberta Mileusnich, five years after his death. The only hard copy of this robust little song is the poor quality home recording Bob made, singing and whistling to the accompaniment of his own little Martin guitar.

I remember years ago, soon after Bob died, that my mom went down to see P-Nuts and brought back a box of old 78s. These records were one-time studio recordings of songs that he wrote and never were recorded [commercially]. But we went out and got a 78 record player, needles - which were hard to find - and hooked it up to a cassette recorder and recorded all the records. As you can imagine the quality was very poor. A little curl of wax built up before the needle so the sound was virtually destroyed.”
(Calin Coburn, July 2, 2000)

We do not have any sheet music for this song.

From the quality of Bob's voice, we estimate the time to be shortly after he retired in 1949. According to his friend, Stuart Hamblen, a great many of his songs were never registered for copyright. He simply didn't get around to filling out the forms. Composing was more important to him. In later years, Stuart and his wife did some of the paperwork for him but many of these home demos were tucked away and forgotten until after his death when his wife and daughter were sorting through the things he left behind for his grandson, Calin Coburn.