HI FOLKS. I JUST WANT TO EXPLAIN THAT THE REASON I SUSPECT THE WORD YAHIE TO REFER TO 'home' IS THE GAELIC WORD FOR HOME IS dhachaigh which is pronounced very much like yahie if you remove the subtle gutteral roll. when i was in cape breton in 1973-1977 i was very interested in researching older folk songs. while learning this song for a union presentation concerning local mining songs i somewhere came across an explanation of the term yahie/yankee (as concerns the korson collection )as opposed to the songs appearance in another local collection where the same lyrics used the term dhaghaigh, which the author explained is his footnotes was pronounced yahie. i asked around about this (most of my searching for old songs was done with people as opposed to books) and i was told that the word referred to the gaelic workers who would come in from the country surrounding areas to work in the mines. back then when gaelic was a more commonly spoken language the gaelic workers who still had english only as a second language would talk among themselves and would be talking about going home to the country.and of course scotland was never far from their minds. and number one on the gaelic hit parade was you guessed it---mo dhachaigh---.i'm actually unclear as to how much this had to do with the extemely heavy scene that was going down at that time in the union versus coal company. i have always thought that the reason the dhachaigh miners were sung of in a negative context was because these were very independant country people who fished, farmed worked in the mines, even in some instances sold songs in ballad form to eek out a living and therefore had other work to fall back on and did not have to put their lives at stake to 'stand the gaff' because of the language barrier and itinerant nature of their presence in the mines they may not have been seen as the strongest supporters of the union cause by all the local songsmiths who were busy adapting the old songs they knew to their new situations. i would say that a very large portion of the songs composed at the time which were considered local were older songs which had a few words changed to make them local, or the same tune as a popular song of the day with local lyrics .this is certainly a device used by many as it makes the songs easier for the general population to learn quickly . an old fiend of mine who in 1925 walked in the may day parade in glace bay (beneath a red flag ) used to say 'a singing parade is a winning parade'. well i don't know if what i'm saying here is making any sense to anyone, and perhaps what i think is not the be all and end all anyway so i think i'll log out. i may be wrong but these are some of the thoughts which come to my mind when the question of the yahie miner rears it's noble head. and if you want to hear a good cape breton mining song check out charlie mackinnons 'ballad of j.b. mclaughlin'. i think it is on one of his records and also on one of the men of the deep cd'. also echoes from labours war, the poetry of dawm fraser is a great read.