Nince Nov. 3, the bent of this column has been to suggest that somehow "Jim Crack Corn" and its companion, "Blue Tail Fly" is somehow related to crow-scaring songs of the British Isles.
There is no such evidence. As Catspaw says, "beyond comprehension."

I am quite aware of the ways in which peoples try to control pests and keep them away from the garden. Among the American Indians they vary from making piles of old cracked corn, squash seeds past their prime and other waste well away from the planted fields to, as the woodland tribes of the northeast did, erecting watcher shelters in the garden, from which women and girls ran out and made noises to scare the marauders, to using scarecrows (ineffective) as well as the method described by Reiver2, to placing pepper and dry mustard over the planted spots. I have seen the shotgun put to good use among the central pueblos along the Rio Grande, in the area in which I was raised. Birds are a problem with seed planting and very young seedlings and when the grain is ripening, but rodents and insects are a greater hazard, throughout the growing season.

None of this has anything to do with "Jim Crack Corn."