Although I've never been a fan of Old Hickory, I'm glad to have the song about him here, even if he may have inadvertently strayed from the other thread. And I'm glad to know that I'm not the only only who loses posts and hits the wrong keys later in the evening.

Lighter, I wondered about Mr. Jones. As always I appreciate your critical sense of these things.

I have been trying once again to drag both "South Australia" and "Rio Grande" back into the 1850s. I've gone back over the literature on both of them and found really nothing more. With regard to "Rio" the 1868 article is still the one to beat. But Gibb's suggestions above are very evocative. I realized that I had fallen somewhere in between "Roll the Cotton Down" and "I'm Alabama Bound" (a riverboat song) and "Oh Susannah". I think both "SA" and "Rio" are hiding just beneath the surface here. The fluidity of these worksongs is beginning to do something to me. The tunes are beginning to move around along with the lyrics. But, I'm going to make sure this gets posted on *this* thread! I'll be interested to see what is where come morning.

I did just go back and check on the list of chanties from Captain John Robinson in THE BELLMAN, which Lighter put up, and "Rio Grande" is there! Any chance of posting those lyrics, Lighter? You say:

"Robinson, an Englishman, went to sea in 1859 at the age of 14. He was over 80 when his five-part article appeared in "The Bellman." Robinson writes that he learned a number of shanties on his first voyage, aboard the brigantine "Emily" to Catania in Sicily. His prime source was an old seaman named Will Halpin, "who had sailed the seas for sixty years, to all parts of the known globe." Halpin had sailed "on the Australian sailing ships during the gold rush, and again during the California rush....[H]e never missed an opportunity to sing his chanties."

Unfortunately Robinson doesn't say precisely which shanties he learned from Halpin. But he does give texts and tunes of the following, which he learned mostly on his first voyages."

This is at least suggestive of the possibility that "Rio" comes from the 60's if not earlier.