The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #168402 Message #4091055
Posted By: Stewie
02-Feb-21 - 12:10 AM
Thread Name: Mudcat Australia-New Zealand Songbook
Subject: RE: Rise Up Mudcat Songbook - Australia
THE DYING SPRAGGER (Anon)
A handsome young spragger lay dying With a miner supporting his head When he raised himself up on his elbow And then to his workmates he said
Wrap me up with my pit lamp and tallow And stow my poor body below Where the ? and the blowflies can’t find me In some dark and cool tunnel below
Take my old crib can and bottle Place one at my head and my toe Then scratch out my name at the pay box And tell them I’m sleeping below
There’s some tea in the black dixie ? tin Line your dip tins up in a row And let’s drink to our next joyful meeting In the sky where all good workers go
I can hear the big wheel on the popper And the cage as it moves down the toe For it sounds the death knell of a spragger Goodbye my good friends I must go
Pay the piper to pipe me a solo Ask the union to sing me a song Have the priests ring out the old church bell So the whole town will know that I’m gone
Oh if I had the wings of a bell bird Right over the town I would fly And I’d fly to the home of my loved ones But alas, my dear cobbers, I die
Wrap me up with my pit lamp and tallow And stow my poor body below Where the ? and the blowflies can’t find me In some dark and cool tunnel below
This coal mining parody of 'The Dying Stockman' is from Alan Musgrove and His Watsaname Band's 'Behind the Times' CD - no label or number but available via Trad&Now. A beaut album.
There is no lyric booklet with the CD - the above transcription is mine. I was unable to decipher the insect (or whatever) accompanying blowflies in the third line of the repeated stanza. It sounds like 'pie-whys'. There is a piwi gene in some insects, but I doubt that is it. I also couldn't make sense of the reference to a dixie mess tin because it sounds like 'black dixie fountain'. I hope someone can supply the correct words.
Note by Alan Musgrove:
It was learnt from the singing of Bill Crossdale who in turn learnt it from Jack Marsden, a miner at Bellbird Colliery in the Hunter Valley of NSW. In coal mining parlance a spragger is a worker who stops coal skips by inserting a piece of timber (a sprig) between the wheel spokes as the skips have no braking system of their own.