Here's is a field recording made by Kenneth Peacock, who collected songs in Newfoundland in the 1950s: Save Your Money When You’re Young Performed by Amos Payne; PEA 108 No. 811. This is one of the songs that Peacock did not include in "Songs of the Newfoundland Outports". It was brought to light by Anna Kearney Guigné and published in "The Forgotten Songs of the Newfoundland Outports: As Taken from Kenneth Peacock’s Newfoundland Field Collection, 1951–1961" (see a review of that book, here).


Guigné wrote a doctoral dissertation on Peacock's work in 2006 that's now available online (PDF).


The YouTube notes:

This Native American [I believe this should be "native American" -- composed in North America, rather than by first peoples - BN] song is generally associated with the lumber woods song tradition. The earliest printing of the song appears to be a version from North Dakota in Rickaby’s Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy (1926: 39–40). As Rickaby poignantly points out, the words of this song undoubtedly moved the “dim spirit-beings of thousands of shanty-boys” who wiled away their wages with little to show for their efforts in later years. From this he concludes, “If a ballad can be defined as ‘a song which tells a story’ then I might feel prompted to call this song a ballad” (Ibid., 199). Beck, who includes the song by the same title in Songs of the Michigan Lumberjacks (1942: 100), notes that lumberjacks usually led a “sober existence” because “a man with a bottle on his hip does not last long” and, when they went to town, they were the “spendingest, drinkingest, fightingest men known.” Fowke, who recorded “Save Your Money” in 1957 from the singing of Jim Doherty (1965: 134-35) also remarks “This is a fine old lumbering song rarely heard today (Ibid., 191-92).

~ Becky in Oregon