How a Rural ‘Snow White’ Daydream Helped Create One of the Most Iconic Western Songs of All Time

Most of us—even non-Disney fans—have, at some point in our lives, pretended to have a Snow White moment with an animal out in nature. Maybe you’ve tried to feed a fuzzy woodland creature crunchy acorns straight from your hand. Maybe you’ve chirped back and forth with a bird, convinced they could understand you. For songwriter Tex Owens, his Snow White fantasy helped him write one of the greatest country Western tunes of all time.

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In addition to being a prolific songwriter, Owens also worked as a deputy sheriff, radio disc jockey, auto mechanic, and, unsurprisingly, a ranch hand. It would be the last side hustle that helped inspire some of his more ubiquitous works, including the mid-1930s Western tune, “The Cattle Call”.

According to the Nashville Songwriters Foundation, Owens came up with the idea for this classic country song after looking out at a snowstorm. While most of us might focus on how warm and content we are inside, Owens couldn’t help but think of all his hooved animal friends bracing against the bitter cold.

Tex Owens Turned His Daydream Into “The Cattle Call”

Per Tex Owens, he was watching the snow fall from his window when he started thinking about the animals stuck in the elements. “My sympathy went out to cattle everywhere, and I just wished I could call them all around me and break some corn over a wagon wheel and feed them,” Owens said. “That’s when the words ‘cattle call’ came to mind. I picked up my guitar, and in thirty minutes, I had wrote the music and four verses to the song.”

Owens was a more successful songwriter than he was a recording artist, and his original rendition of “The Cattle Call” didn’t get much traction. The song gained a new life after Eddy Arnold cut multiple versions of the yodeling tune. “The Cattle Call” became a signature song for Arnold and a staple in the Western music canon. Over six decades after Owens first wrote the song, he cut a duet version with LeAnn Rimes, which peaked at No. 18 on the Billboard Top Country Singles Sales chart following its 1999 release.

And to Owens’ credit, “The Cattle Call” sounds exactly like something you should sing to beckon a herd of lumbering cows to you so that you can feed them corn by hand—you know, real Western Snow White business.

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