One more related song from the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, #358

TALE OF A TRAMP

Let me sit down a moment
A stone's got in my shoe.
Don't you commence your cussin'
I ain't done nothing to you.

Yes, I'm a tramp—what of it?
Folks say we ain't no good.
Tramps have got to live, I reckon,
Though folks don't think we should.

Once I was young and handsome,
Had plenty of cash and clothes.
That was before I got to topplin'*
And got gin in my nose.

Way down in the Lehigh valley
Me and my people grew;
I was a blacksmith captain;
Yes, and a good one, too.

Me and my wife, and Nellie—
Nellie was just sixteen,
And she was the pootiest cretur
The valley had ever seen.

Beaux! Why, she had a dozen,
Had 'em from near and fur,
But they were mostly farmers;
None of them suited her.

But there was a city chap,
Handsome, young, and tall—
Oh, curse him! I wish I had him
To strangle against yonder wall.

He was no man for Nellie.
She didn't know no ill.
Mother, she tried to stop it,
But you know young girl's will.

Well, it's the same old story,
Common enough, you'll say.
But he was a soft-tongued devil
And got her to run away.

More than a month, or later,
We heard from the poor young thing.
He had run away and left her
Without any wedding ring.

Back to her home we brought her,
Back to her mother's side.
Filled with a ragin' fever
She fell at my feet and died.

Frantic with shame and sorrow
Her mother began to sink
And died in less than a fortnight.
That's when I took to drink.

Come, give a glass now, colonel,
And I'll be on my way.
And I'll tramp till I catch that scoundrel
If it takes till judgment clay.



*Perhaps merely miswritten for "tipplin'."


No tune for this one, either.