John Doan: Music

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It took all kinds of people to settle the west. While many families forged each treacherous mile by covered wagon, others tramped through the back hills by horse or mule, impatient to dig the gold from the ground. They were wild and adventurous, and though they were not known for their honesty and good moral judgement, I've written this music to remember them and their zest for life. I went to the old mining town of Virginia City to compose this sketch. If you remember the old TV series Bonanza, Virginia City was the point on the map that caught fire during the opening credits. The city retains much of the spirit of the wild west with it's wooden boardwalks, noisy saloons, and the newspaper office where Mark Twain mined his first journalistic claims. But of the people who made Virginia City, what remains is reduced to bone and dust beneath weathered tombstones in the old cemetery. What they said and did, whom they loved, the joys and sorrows they experienced have been forgotten. Biting winter nights and blistering summer days have even worn their carved names from our view. I stood in the cemetery at sunset and began to imagine the tune Clementine cast as a lullaby to all the miners now sleeping. She was a "daughter of a forty-niner" and was "gone and lost forever." As the stars bejeweled the clear Nevada sky, my thoughts wandered to the excitement of the west through the tune The Streets Of Laredo. It tells about "a young cowboy dressed up in white linen as cold as the clay". As the moon rose on the jagged horizon, it seemed fitting to include the tune Buffalo Gals - "Buffalo Gals won't you come out tonight ... and dance by the silvery moon."