re: "sandy floor"

Baltimore and the sandy floor evidently were part of an older song. An 1868 reference has,

"As I came home from Baltimore,
One foot behind and t'other before,
I told my my mother my feet was sore
A dancin' on a sandy floor."

(The Model House: A Comedy in Five Acts.Albany, NY, 1868. Pg. 30)

The song must have come to mind when a chantyman was "in the moment." Its construction has an internal logic of its own.

L.A. Smith publish the phrase in her 1888 collection, in the lyrics to "Tommy's gone to Hilo." This is one rendition that Smith appears to have collected directly in the field.

Others would go on to recycle the material in Smith's work. People like C Fox Smith and Stan Hugill borrowed lines from previous publications and inserted them in there versions. I am doubtful that the line "sandy floor" was *necessarily* sung by anyone else except Smith's informant. It's a case of the chantyman's method to create in the moment, rather than the case of a standard lyric. Even if it were at all standardized, its repeated appearance in print and in revival singers' mouths would be false evidence of that, I think.

This exactly what I mean by the writers constructing a false sense of discreet, standardized texts. And when we sing those texts verbatim, we end up reinforcing them.

In context, the lyrics Smith's chantyman sang were:

There's pretty Sall and Jenny Brown,
A-dancing on that stony ground,
Tommy's gone to Baltimore,
A-rolling on the sandy floor, ...

So "sandy floor" proceeds from "stony ground", which latter which seems to probably have been sung just to make rhyme. The whole thing proceeds from a bit of stream of consciousness. Starting with the generic "gal's name", e.g. "XYZ Brown," one makes a rhyme as "[stony] ground. Stony ground, perhaps, then evokes the "sandy floor" as a contrast, and the remembered song.