Boom Town
From the Songs & Stories album · Frontier story song · 1849–1920s
Demo recording
Produced with AI music tools, not performed by me or a band. The lyrics are mine, and a live version with real musicians is the next step.
The West wasn’t only built from the east. In 1849, gold lit San Francisco, and ambition and grit started pushing inland from the Pacific. Before he was a lawman, a young Wyatt Earp hauled freight off the Los Angeles wharf, through the Cajon Pass and across the Mojave to Salt Lake City. That was a planned city the Mormon pioneers had built in a desert nobody else wanted.
Then the rails came from the east in 1869, and the West took off. Earp lived to see it all, from tumbleweeds to the bright lights of Hollywood, and he told it once more on a movie set to a young John Ford.
A story about a boom. Like most stories out of that town, it might be true.
Lyrics
Intro · spoken
It all began San Fran in 49,
when gold lit the wick… Boom Town!
Instrumental, building
Chorus
Mojawvee on up the Rockies, the west laid out wild,
ambition’n grit came a’comin and a’comin it came —
Verse 1
Freight off the wharf hauled inland from L.A.,
rolled’em wagons north east through the Cajon Pass.
Mojawvee burned, sandstone sizzled, bone dry’n cacti
ridin’ the trail till Vegas Spring, endless skies, clouds’on high
16 mules a’lean’n in, 14 days on Utah,
a’yell’n, a’curs’n, a’whip’n upland on to Salt Lake
Work’n the boom ’49ers had blazed, 69 the rail was laid.
Chorus
Mojawvee on up the Rockies, the west laid out wild,
ambition’n grit came a’comin and a’comin it came, a’comin it came —
Bridge
Then come the wire, a’singin’ in from the east
by rail came enterprise, from New York in a week
the west we’d hauled by mule over sand
rose up off the ground, broke loose ’cross the land,
stars fell from the sky and lit it up grand
Verse 2
From the Buick stepped Wyatt, out onto the set
"One more for the picture, tell’n em how it went."
Chorus
Mojawvee to Salt Lake, the west had been tamed,
ambition’n grit, a’comin it came.
