The son of a New York City lawyer and real estate investor Nathan Howard “Jack” Thorp (1867-1940) attended Princeton, before discovering the West while visiting his brother in Nebraska. Working as a cattle wrangler, he became fascinated with the songs cowboys sang, and, in 1887, rode more than 1,500 miles on horseback collecting and transcribing the songs he encountered. In 1908 he published a 50-page book of 23 songs titled, Songs of the Cowboys, which predated John A. Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads by two years. Thorp wrote his first song, “Little Joe, the Wrangler” while on a cattle drive from New Mexico to Texas in 1898.