Git along little dogies

I should think that even on this side of the Atlantic this old cowboy song is familiar to most.

As I was out walking one morning for pleasure
I spied a cowpuncher a-riding along
His hat was throwed back and his spurs were a-jingling
And as he approached he was singing this song

Whoopie-ti-yi-yo
Get along little dogies
It's your misfortune and none of my own
Whoopie-ti-yi-yo
Get along little dogies
You know that Wyoming will be your new home

Early in spring we round up all the dogies
Mark them and brand them and bob off their tails
Round up the horses and load the chuck wagon
And throw all them dogies right out on the trail

Whoopie-ti-yi-yo ...

Your mother was raised way down in Texas
Where the jimson weed and the chollas grow
But we'll fill you up on those prickly-pear briars
Until you are ready for Idaho

(Dogies were motherless calves, see below.*)

Like most such old songs in America the tune was brought over from Europe with the original immigrants. It just so happens that I was listening to a radio programme this morning called The First LP in Ireland, about a pioneering initiative that started in the late 1940s to collect the vanishing musical traditions of Ireland. Initially it was a joint project by the BBC and the Irish Folklore Society, but in the early 50s the celebrated American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax got involved. The team travelled around the remotest rural areas persuading people to talk about and sing their traditional songs into a tape recorder.
One tune Lomax instantly recognized as Little Dogies but it was a lullaby, as if sung by an old man to his wife's baby - fathered by another man. Lomax questioned the singer and was told "Oh, that's the oldest song in the world: Joseph sang it to the baby Jesus!"

I was so amused by this that I went to look for some dogie stand-ins to blip.

You can listen to the cowboy version of the song here, in a 1940 Roy Rogers film.

*There's some further material regarding the origins of the song on an Irish language discussion forum here. It suggest that 'dogie' may derive from an Irish word meaning 'hard to rear'.