I've just finished making Grant Rogers' recording available as a CD, folks. In fact, it was the first of our old LPs that I elected to turn into a "custom CD" (made here in our own studio). It's got some darned fine songs on it, most created by this remarkable stone quarry worker, fiddler, and "Songmaker of the Catskills." I know that Pete Seeger recorded this song once. He learned from Grant's singing of it back in the days of Camp Woodland. I haven't heard Pete's recording, but wonder if the alternate words could be from that source. Grant always explained that he heard John Barnes (pronounced Bar-ness), a fellow construction worker on a job with Grant in New Jersey back in the days of the Depression, sing a fragment of this. Grant said Barnes couldn't carry a tune and only had a bit of the song, anyway. So Grant, never one to pass up a good idea, created the tune and wrote most of the words himself.

Sandy