The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59756 Message #2160148
Posted By: Joe Offer
29-Sep-07 - 07:33 PM
Thread Name: ADD: Happy Miner/Unhappy Miner (Old Put)
Subject: ADD: The Gatineau Girls
Ah, bless you, Mick.
#54, "The Gatineau Girls" Sung by O. J. Abbott Hull, Quebec April 1960
The Gatineau Girls
I am a jolly shantyboy, I love to sing and dance. I wonder what my girl would say if she would see my pants. Fourteen patches on the knees and sixteen on the stern, I wear them while I'm in the woods, and home I do return.
REFRAIN I'm on my jovial way, and I spend my money free. I have plenty, come and drink lager beer with me.
I like the girls of the Gatineau, they are so trim and neat. They are so slim around the waist; their kisses are so sweet. There's Mary Ann and Josephine and likewise Jenny too— Along with some of the Gatineau girls I'll roam this country through.
We often go on dancing—we dance all night, you see— And often all the girls they grow very fond of me. We dance all night till broad daylight, we dance until the morn— Head and tail up like a steer running through the corn.
Source: Lumbering Songs from the North Woods, Edith Fowke, 1970, 1985
Fowke's notes:
Though many other songs tell of "the jolly shantyboy," few are as light-hearted as this. Beck includes it as the first item in his Lore of the Lumbercamps, but his note indicates that it was recited rather than sung in Michigan. In his Cowboy Songs Lomax gives a similar text as "The Happy Miner," again without a tune. John Norman of Munising, Michigan, recorded it as "The Raving Shanty Boy" for the Library of Congress in 1938. All of these versions obviously sprang from the same source, probably a vaudeville song, but O. J. Abbott's is localized in the Canadian northwoods: the valley of the Gatineau River north of Ottawa, a famous lumbering region in the last century. His first stanza and refrain are like the other versions; the last two stanzas are quite different except for the line "Head and tail up like a steer running through the corn." He sings it to a popular square-dance tune usually known as "The Crooked Stovepipe."
REFERENCES PRINTED. B. C. Beck, Lore, ii (reprinted in E. C. Beck, Bunyan, 31— 32). Lomax and Lomax, Cowboy Songs, 409—410. RECORDED. Library of Congress AFS 235 5A (John Norman). Prestige/ International 25014 (Abbott, "The Jolly Shantyboy"). TUNE RELATIVES Leach, 280. Peacock, 515.
Tune available on request, but I'm too lazy to post a MIDI today and it's not the primary "Weaving" tune we're seeking. Interesting that Fowke didn't track this one back to "Old Put." -Joe-