I've been searching for the rest of this song for years without success. My wife Amba learned it in camp as a child in the 1950s, but it must go back decades further, as few people were writing songs like this any later than WWI.

I've always assumed that, like "Chicken Can't Roost Behind the Moon," "Preacher and the Bear" and others of the kind, it originated as a, excuse the term, "coon song" in the period when these were popular, approximately the 1890s-1910.

If so, it was a product of the Tin Pan Alley of the time, and ought to be traceable to a given publisher and composer. But the standard web collections, Levy, American Memory and so on, don't have it.

The implied plot is repeated in dozens of similar songs: the narrator is out at night on no good purpose ... stealing chickens or whatnot (the reigning cliche of the time). He is about to be caught and he needs either the shelter of darkness, or else, as in this case, the light of the moon to give him a good getaway.

Hope somebody can find the source ... and the rest of the song. Levy and American Memory are constantly adding new sheet music -- just last month I found a much-wanted song of that era on Levy that hadn't been there previously, so it's worth checking their collections repeatedly. Hope somebody turns it up! Bob