Hi, Carter. Thanks for bringing this song to mind.

On Sept. 11, 1923, A. W. Cederstrom of El Dorado, Ark., wrote to Robert W. Gordon in Berkeley:

“Would like very much to get the words of a song that I heard when a boy, it is quite a lengthy song but I can only remember one verse of it;
        ‘The wind was blowing coldly, the gin is getting low,
        I can’t think we’ll get another drink
        Till we get to Buffalo.’

“I think it was called ‘The Storm on [the] Erie Canal’ have looked for [it] in old song books but so far have not been able to find it.”

Replying on Sept. 15, Gordon said the song was “unknown to me.”


Minneapolis Times (June 8, 1890):

"Men...stand on the corners and wail, 'The E-ri-e is rising; the gin is getting low."

Sandburg’s tune much resembles the first half of Thomas Rice’s minstrel piece “(Old)Johnny Boker” (or “Do Mr. Boker Do”), written before 1855.

Legman got a bawdy version from a 1920s manuscript but never printed it.

Some thirty-five years ago I heard a guy in his thirties sing the final stanza, "The cook she's in the whore house,/ And the captain he's in jail;/ And I'm the last damn son of a bitch/ That's left to tell the tale." The "tarnals" and "goldurns" in other versions he sang as "goddamns." All of this could have been his own doing - but it certainly sounds "folklike" to me!