Coyotes (song)

Coyotes is an American Western song written by Bob McDill and closely associated with cowboy singer Don Edwards.^[1] It appears on Edwards' 1993 album Goin' Back to Texas,^[2] and was featured on the soundtrack of the 2005 documentary film Grizzly Man.^[3]

The Great American Country network named Coyotes as one of their Top 20 Cowboy and Cowgirl Songs;^[4] Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.^[5] In a 2010 interview with Cowboys & Indians magazine, Edwards said "Bob McDill wrote the song in 1984 or '85 and couldn't pitch it to anyone. He put it in a drawer in his office and forgot about it until we started recording at Warner Brothers."^[1]

The song is a story of what happens to a man when the world as he knows it and worked in it begins to disappear.^[4] Among the things that the protagonist says "are gone" are nineteenth-century people, animals and concepts that contemporary listeners may not be familiar with: Pancho Villa, longhorns, drovers, Comanches, outlaws, Geronimo, Sam Bass, the lion, the red wolf, Quantrill (sounds like Quantro in the song, (one version he says Quanah Parker, who was a Comanche. So what sounds like Quantro may be Quanah) and Stand Watie. In the end, the protagonist is gone, too.

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