In our time Country Music is inseparably connected to the romantic vision of life in the Wild West. But at the start of musicbusiness the songs of the hardworking cowboys was not considered valuable. The music of cattle drivers was considered unsuitable for living rooms. Only musicologists would occasionally travel west to record the prairie workers. It was the success of one Marion Try Slaughter aka Vernon Dalhart that pesuaded Carl Sprague to record some songs that he learned as a cattle driver before he set out to study agriculture. His ballad of a dying cowboy "When the Work's all done this Fall" was an instant success, enhanced furhermore by some publicity pictures in cowboy outfit. The factoryworkers in the east, suffering badly from the taylorism discovered their romantic notion of the free range, and bought thousands of his recordings. But Sprague was not too much impressed. Though he sold 900 000 copies of his first record alone, he remained distustful to music biz, continuing recording only in sparetime. When in 1929 Wall Street crashed, music industry did too. Sprague took the money he saved, to go back to do cattle business again, still singing in a baptist choir until his death in 1979.