G'day Snuffy,

Purely to satisfy my curiosity: Why Super D's ... ? What were ordinary D's? (Well, we don't seem to have had these out here in the Antipodes.)

BTW: Our original requester, Konrad, doesn't seem to have come back ... perhaps he was discouraged by all the people who dived in with songs about 'train-drivers' and 'truck-drivers' ... when he had written (requested):

"... There a not a lot of folksongs about bulldozer -driver ..."

I wasn't all that accurate with my quick recollection of Ewan MacColl's The Fitter's Song, which is about a bulldozer fitter, if not bulldozer driver ... The words should have been more like:

I am a roving rambler, a fitter to me trade,
I can fix you anything, a camshaft to a spade.
I can fix a dodgy gearbox - or mend a broken tread;
Decoke a Leyland engine while I'm standing on me head.
          So it's shift, boys, shift! Do the job and draw your pay.
          When this road is finished, I'll be moving on me way.
          I'll clean me tools, and wrap 'em, in a pair of oily jeans.
          You'll always find me working where you find the big machines.

I've worked in far-off places since I left the coaly Tyne;
I work among the heavies and I wear a roving sign.
I keep the tractors on the job, a-turning up the soil,
And I've followed my nose around the world by the smell of diesel oil.
          So it's shift, boys, shift! Do the job and draw your pay.
          When this road is finished, I'll be moving on me way.
          You'll find me where the tractors are, on roads and hydro schemes,
          Playing the lousy nursemaid to a pack of big machines.

Ewan reckoned that the tune was the traditional Australian one for "Travelling Down the Castlereagh" (a folk setting of the of 'Banjo' Paterson's poem "The Bushman's Song") ... but I think his version of that tune has more of his accent (and Scots ancestry) than mine!

Regards,

Bob