WHEN THE SHANTYBOY COMES DOWN

When the shantyboy comes down, In his pockets, fifty pound,
He will look around some pretty girl to find.
If he finds her not too shy, With a dark and rolling eye,
The poor shanty boy is well pleased in his mind.

When the landlady comes in, She is neat and very trim;
She is like an evening star.
If she finds him in good trim, She is always ready to wait on him,
And from one to two they’ll sit up on the bar.

So the shanty boy goes on ‘Till his money is all gone,
And the landlady begins for to fret.
So he says, “My lady do not fret, I will pay my honest debt,
And bid adieu to the girl we left in town.”

There’s a gang that’s in command, So the old folks understand,
And it’s for the backwoods they are bound.
With a whisky and a song We will shove our old canoe along,
Bid adieu to the girl I had in town.


#28, page 74, The Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Songs, compiled by Edith Fowke, 1973

Notes: 28. When the Shantyboy Comes Down Fowke LSNW 159 (Folkways FM 4052)

Just as sailors go on a spree when they reach shore after a long voyage, so the shantyboys whoop it up when they reach town after a long winter in the woods. It was natural for the British sailors’ song Jack Tar on Shore (K. 39) to be adapted to describe The Lumber¬man in Town, as this ballad is known on the east coast. Mrs Eckstorm, who gives the earliest text (96), comments: ‘This is one of the finest of the old woods songs and if nothing else showed that it came from the British provinces we might guess it from the melancholia in it; this self-pity is not a characteristic of the native of Maine.’ The song is fairly rare: in addition to Mrs Eckstorm’s text from 1901, there is a text in the Gordon MSS (No. 263); Ives got two versions from a Prince Edward Island singer (NEF 2, 58; 5, 68), and Vincent includes it in his Lumberjack Songs (4).