The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #52717   Message #808479
Posted By: masato sakurai
22-Oct-02 - 09:29 AM
Thread Name: Origin: Johnny Come Down to Hilo
Subject: RE: Origin: Johnny Come Down to Hilo
Not found, but mentioned in Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (U of Oklahoma Pr, 1962, 1977, pp. 241-242):

Though the versification reveals Emmett's hand, numerous lines and images were nevertheless lifted, according to professional custom, from earlier minstrel songs. Appearing alongside passages from English folk texts and such urban colloquialism as "o.k." are many bits from the workaday reality of the slave, as well as such expressions as "going home," "traveling a rocky road," and "joining the union," which, though stripped of their religious meaning, derive from Negro spirituals. The following song, which was sung in the early forties by colored plantation hands in South Carolina as they shucked corn, is a good example:

Johnny come down de hollow. Oh, hollow!
Johnny come down de hollow. Oh, hollow!
De nigger-trader got me. Oh, hollow!
De speculator bought me. Oh, hollow!
I'm sold for silver dollars. Oh, hollow!
Boys, go catch de pony. Oh, hollow!
Bring him round de corner. Oh, hollow!
I'm goin' away to Georgia. Oh, hollow!
Boys, good-bye forever. Oh, hollow!*

Emmett remembered almost all of these lines when he composed his walk-arounds. The opening he borrowed literally for his "John Come down de Hollow," and the rest he paralleled, in practically the same sequence, in his "Road to Georgia" and its alternate text version "Road to Richmond" as follows: "De niggar trader tink me nice" ("De speculator tink me nice"), "De white folks sell me for half price" (later: "We'll fotch a thousand dollars down"), and "Under way, under way Ho! we are on de way to Georgia."
[*Quoted in Norris Yates, "Four Plantation Songs Noted by William Cullen Bryant," Southern Folklore Quarterly (December, 1951)]

~Masato