 The Sons of the Pioneers on Grassroots Gold with Home on the Range. You know, it's an amazing story behind that. The song was written, or the words were written as a poem to start out with by an Ohio-born physician homesteader in Kansas and published in 1874 as a poem called Western Home. Then the melody was written by Daniel Kelly, a Civil War veteran and a musician from Rhode Island who had settled near Higley in Kansas and