Anyone who hasn't already done so should check out the other threads concerning this song (listed at the top of the page). There are numerous versions of the lyrics, the tune, as well as varying theories on the song's origins.

Each of these threads includes the quote included in Joe's second message, above, posted back in '98. Some of them also include refutations/clarifications of the quote's contents, posted by various contributors (including, once or twice, me). Here I go again; I'll try to be more complete this time around.

There is one Lake Pontchartrain (singular not plural) which forms the northern boundary of the present-day city of New Orleans. The city was founded on the banks of the Mississippi River and was originally quite a bit smaller (including only the present-day French Quarter), so it is true that the Lake was, for many years, miles north of the city limits.

The lakeshore is currently well-defined by a seawall, and a huge area of lakefront real estate is former swampland and/or lakebottom that has been filled over the years. Before all that civil engineering, there was a more gradual swampy transition between lake and land, and the constantly-moving incursion of lakewater might well have been characterized as multiple "lakes" by some observers.

The term "Creole," from the Spanish "crillo," originally had a quite specific meaning -- a person of the first generation born in the new world of European parentage (i.e., one or both parents born in Spain, France, or -- less commonly -- another European nation). So technically, a "Creole" could be European on both the mother's and father's side, or half-American-Indian, or half-African. In practice, the term came to be applied most commonly to "colored" people of part-European, part-African ancestry.

Today, in and around the city of N.O., the word "Creole" usually refers to members of a light-skinned-black local aristocracy consisting of families who can trace their roots back many generations to Free People of Color who (more-or-less) thrived under French and Spanish rule before the Louisiana Purchase. While technically and legally "Negroes" under the old Jim Crow laws, and while culturally more black than white, most of these folks are much more European than African in terms of ancestry.

In the Louisiana countryside west of the city, the term "Creole" is applied to all French-speaking black folks, not necessarily light-skinned and without any aristocratic pretensions, mostly independent farmers -- the community that developed zydeco music.

In the mid-1830s, during the first mass emigration from Ireland to the US prompted by the first potato famine, New Orleans was by far the most popular US destination -- large numbers of jobs were available to dig the New Basin Canal from Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississipi River. These jobs were available to immigrants because the work was so dangerous that slave-owners would not risk their "property" to perform the necessary heavy labor. The work force was overwhelmingly Irish, and huge numbers died of tropical diseases, mostly yellow fever. In fact, statistically, an Irish worker had a better chance of surviving if he stayed home to suffer through the famine than if he went to New Orleans to work and die on the canal.

Family and friends who stayed home in Ireland were certainly aware of the many deaths in the swamp, and Irish immigrants never again came to New Orleans in significant numbers, turning instead to New York, Boston, and (via the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes) Chicago.

Even today, native New Orleanians with Irish surnames are many generations (170+ years) removed from their Irish roots and usually of mixed Irish/German/Italian/French ancestry. Anyone here who knows of relatives in Ireland, or who even knows what county or what town their ancestors came from, is someone who moved to New Orleans from the North or West (or whose parents made such a move).

There seems to be no sure evidence whether "Lakes" is an American or an Irish song. It is, of course, part of the contemporary repertoire for "traditional" Irish musicians, and the subject matter is just as obviously American. My theory -- what I'd **like** to believe ;^) --is that the song comes from one of those poor Irishmen who built the New Basin Canal, or from a family member back in Ireland reading his letters, perhaps creating the song to memorialize a brother or son or friend after he had succumbed to the yellow fever.

Some theorists place the song in the Civil War era, figuring that the reference(s) to "foreign money" concern Confederate vs Union coins and bills. This is quite plausible. There were Irish units on both sides of that conflict, including the "Fighting Tigers of Ireland," formed in New Orleans, that Jed Marum sings about. The (many) Irish in the city at the time were survivors of the canal project and their families, almost all of whom had arrived in the US about 10-12 years earlier.

Whether set in the 1830s, 40s, or even 50s, the swampy shores of the lake were virtually uninhabited (for that metter, uninhabitable). Finding that Creole gal at her mammy's lakeshore cabin was undoubtedly a fantasy, whether dreamed by a canal laborer or a soldier -- which fits with the geographical misunderstandings.