1893        Ralph, Julian. "The Old Way to Dixie." _Harper's New Monthly Magazine_ 86(512) (Jan. 1893).

Headed down the Mississippi on the old fashioned steamboat CITY OF PROVIDENCE. The refrains of roustabouts (who earn "a dollar a day") are noted. One has the famus floating lyric of "Johnny Come Down to Hilo" and "Hog-eye", i.e. "Who's been here since I been gone?"
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At one stop which we did make, Captain Carvell ordered a barge pushed out of the way—"so's we shan't make a bunglesome landing," he said. The nearest great landingstage, a long gang-plank hung by the middle from a sort of derrick,and capable of connecting the boat with a hill or a flat surface, was let down on the bank. The unavoidable flour-barrels came head foremost along a wooden slide this time.and a darky on the boat sang an incessant line, "Somebody told me so," as a warning to the men below that another and another barrel was coming. They are fond of chanting at their work, and they give vent to whatever comes into their heads, and then repeat it thousands of times, perhaps. It is not always a pretty sentence, but every such refrain serves to time their movements. "O Lord God! you know you done wrong," I have heard a negro say with each bag that was handed to him to lift upon a pile. "Been a slave all yo' days; you 'ain't got a penny saved," was another refrain: and still another, chanted incessantly, was: "Who's been here since I's been gone? Big buck nigger with a derby on." They are all "niggers" once you enter the Southern country. Every one calls them so, and they do not often vary the custom among themselves.
These roustabouts are nothing like as forward as the lowest of their race that we see in the North. …They earn a dollar a day, but have not learned to save it. …Though they chant at their work, I seldom saw them laugh or heard them sing a song, or knew one of them to dance during the voyage. The work is hard, and they are kept at it, urged constantly by the mates on shore and aboard, as the Southern folks say that negroes and mules always need to be. But the roustabouts' faults are excessively human, after all, and the consequence of a sturdy belief that they need sharper treatment than the rest of us leads to their being urged to do more work than a white man.
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