This book is for

Laura,

who looks cute,
when she wears
a cowgirl suit.

The idea of adapting the song She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain into a picture book was suggested to me by Kate Burns, who has edited several of my books. 

One of the first things I had to do was research the origin of the song.  She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain is an old American folk song based on a Negro spiritual called When the Chariot Comes.  The original lyricist is unknown, but the song is believed to date back to the 1800s  - so there was no problem with copyright!

It’s not clear who the “she” in the song is.  The song was known to be popular with railroad work gangs, so one explanation is that "she" is the train that will be coming along the tracks that the gangs were laying.  Another possible explanation is that "she" refers to the union organiser “Mother” Jones who travelled the country setting up the first labour unions.  You can read more about the origins of the song on this page of the Wikipedia website.

Use this player to hear the song's tune

FIRST VERSE OF THE CAMPFIRE VERSION She'll be comin' ‘round the mountain when she comes, TOOT-TOOT! She'll be comin' ‘round the mountain when she comes, TOOT-TOOT! She'll be comin' ‘round the mountain, She'll be comin' ‘round the mountain, She'll be comin' ‘round the mountain when she comes, TOOT-TOOT!

There are several versions of the song in existence, which all have minor variations.  One popular campfire version includes different sound effects for each verse, the first verse of which is shown opposite.

This version is sometimes sung in an accumulative form, with each sound effect being repeated at the end of subsequent verses until you end up with a string of sound effects at the end of the final verse.  It was this accumulative form of the campfire version that I used as a starting point for my adaptation.

However I felt that even this version was too repetitive for a picture book text, with the same phrase repeated five times for every verse.  I wanted to break down the repetition a bit and add a little more character and originality to the words.  The problem was, if I took out too much of the repetition the song would lose its familiarity – which would be a major part of the book’s appeal.  After playing around with it a bit, I decided to substitute a rhyming couplet for the third and fourth repetitions, which allowed me to maintain the song's familiar rhythm.

Having settled on a verse structure, I started to look at the individual verses.  I kept all the verses from the campfire version except the one about having “to sleep with grandma”. My original idea was that the ‘she’ in the title was a Buffalo Bill type cowgirl entertainer who turns up and entertains the town with her extraordinary exploits.  So I wrote six new verses to develop the story along those lines.  I’m a bit of a Clint Eastwood fan, so the “paint the whole town purple” verse is a reference to his western movie "High Plains Drifter", in which he paints the whole town red.

Two of my original verses were eventually cut from the final edit, but if you who fancy attempting an extended version, here they are.  They go straight after the dustbin verse in the book.

And she'll only eat bananas when she comes, MUNCH-MUNCH! Yes, she'll only eat bananas when she comes, MUNCH-MUNCH! She eats eight at every meal, And she even eats the peel! Yes, she'll only eat bananas when she comes, MUNCH-MUNCH! SLURP-SLURP! BISH-BOSH! YEE-HA! SQUISH–SPLAT! TEE-HEE! WHOA BACK! TOOT-TOOT!

And she'll sleep out in the stables when she comes, HEE-HAW! Yes, she'll sleep out in the stables when she comes, HEE-HAW! She'll just grab a heap of straw, And bed down upon the floor. Yes, she'll sleep out in the stables when she comes, HEE-HAW! MUNCH-MUNCH! SLURP-SLURP! BISH-BOSH! YEE-HA! SQUISH–SPLAT! TEE-HEE! WHOA BACK! TOOT-TOOT!

Some of Deborah’s first character sketches, showing the narrator and the cowgirl, whom Deborah christened Clayton Cactus and Bonnie Bandit.

Although Kate Burns had suggested the project, her company did not want to publish it, but it was quickly picked up by Lara Hancock at Egmont. Lara shared my view that the book’s illustrations should have a zany feel and already had an illustrator in mind.  She sent me some proofs of Deborah Allwright’s illustrations for The Night Pirates.  The delightfully boisterous girl pirates that Deborah had created for that book made it obvious that she was a perfect choice for this one.

The lyrics of the song are written in the future tense, so I'd proposed that we have a narrator character who would tell the children of the town what to expect when the enigmatic “she” arrived.  I’d suggested that this narrator might be a schoolmistress or an old grandpappy, but Deborah’s solution (revealed in her first character sketches shown opposite) of using a singing cactus was far more surreal and appealing.  Other elements that Deborah introduced, such as the band of animal musicians, helped bring the book to life, but what holds the book together is the energetic drawings of the central character, who Deborah christened Bonnie Bandit.

One of the ideas that occurred to me after Deborah had started work on the pictures was the actions page at the back of the book.  When the song is performed at campfires the sound effects are often accompanied by appropriate actions and I thought it would be nice to carry this through to the book.  To get the idea across, my daughter Laura borrowed a cowgirl costume (we even managed to get a pink one) and posed for a set of photographs showing the actions that went with each sound.  I marked these photos up with arrows and captions and Deborah drew them up using the characters from the story.  Click here to see the original action sheet including the actions for the two cut verses.  It was these images that prompted my dedication for the book “For Laura who looks cute, when she wears a cowgirl suit.”

My daughter, Laura, demonstrating one of the actions for the song. Click here to see Laura demonstrating all the actions.