See CD description at JIM POST'S WEBSITE. Perhaps you can order it and transcribe it. It's one of the best matches between lyric and tune I've ever heard or sung, feels wonderful in the throat and the vowel shapes to sing it correctly are lovely. Very pretty tune.

~S~

More remembered lyric:

My papa is a xxx on the Fever River,
Works like a xxx for the little he got.

????? Or is that second line from some other song.

The first verse, I believe, is about the father's work, the lead being smelted and loaded for market.

One verse is about the parents overheard by the boy, about how hard he (the boy) will be fated to work. As opposed to the more fortunate sister who will work indoors in the "nice warm kitchen," the boy will work like a "sweat like a mule in the falling snow," and presumably barefoot at that.

Another (the freedom fragment one above) is about slavery being illegal in Illinois. Yet this is a slave family, and slaving did apparently occur routinely in Galena because another song in the project is about a slave who buys hius freedom but forgets to get the deal in writing, so the vast fortune he has made on his own time by hios owner's permission, digging hios own share of the lead, is taken in payment. Without a receipt, he is is reinslaved and has to buy himself all over again, but friends step in to intervene.

~Susan