Good find, Oldsod and 999. I could have been rightly proud of myself if I had thought to look in Walton in 2002...

YIM YONSON (The Scow Sam Patch)


Yim Yonson ship from lumberyard
    Upon de scow Sam Patch;
He didn't know his starboard bow
    From oft de forward hatch.
He make big bluff before he sail
    That he ben sailor man,
But when de trouble struck de scow,
    Yim had to show his han'.

De scow ben in de cordwood trade.
    She sail from Sister Bay,
An' Yim he would be handyman
    Till off Twin Points one day
When yust like finger snap
    A squall on de wood scow flew
An' made her stan' on her beam's end
    An' call up all de crew.

De captain swore like crazy man,
    An' at Yim Yonson yell:
"Yump up an' rif dat tops'l queek
    Or it ben gone to Hell!"
But Yim, he say, "I will not stir
    From dis cahutan stanchion;
Der ben ten tousand tops'ls, yes,
    But only one Yim Yonson!"

An' dat's how Yim, he lose his yob,
    An' no more go to sea—
At sailin' he ben greenhorn, sure,
    An' always want to be.
Ven he was kicked from off de ship,
    He heard de captain swore;
But said, "I'd rather lan' dis vay
    Dan float along de shore."


Notes: Large numbers of Scandinavians immigrated to Lake Michigan and the prairie states to the west in the 1880s. Finding similarities between their homeland and their new surroundings, they quite naturally took jobs as loggers and sailors. Rather than the French accent of scow songs from the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair, "Yim Yonson" puts a heavy Scandinavian flavor on the familiar tale of a landsman-turned--sailor in over his head. This greenhorn song is set in Lake Michigan's Green Bay and sung to the same air as "The Wood Scow Julie Plante." It was sometimes referred to by the name of the scow, which was the same as that of the man who, on October 7, 1829, dove into the Niagara River and survived. Buoyed by the success, Patch dove into the Niagara Falls on October 17. Not one to rest on his laurels, he dove into the Genesee Falls at Rochester, New York, on November 13, 1829. That dive killed him.
This version was obtained in the summer of 1932 from S. C. Jacobson, lightkeeper and former sailor of Waukegan, Illinois. He said he had learned it about thirty years earlier while sailing Lake Michigan lumber schooners. Other mariners knew the song or fragments of it, and said they came from "Yim Yonson's Philosophy" and "De Scow Sam Patch."


Source: Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors, by Ivan H. Walton and Joe Grimm (Wayne State University Press, 2002), page 166