Of the nine songs Mr. [Gordon] Howard sang for me in May, 1960,
six were more or less bawdy. They included the old and widely
known "Foggy Dew" and "The Old Man Came Home One Night" (Child 274),
along with four more recent pieces. Of most interest is "Boring for
Oil," a modern counterpart of the many older songs using trade
symbolism, which he sang to the tune of "Villikens and His Dinah":

I arrived in Calgary October the tenth
And a week in that city on pleasure I spent—
A week in that city prospecting the soil
In search of a spot to go boring for oil.

One bright sunny day as I strolled down the street
A pretty fair damsel I happened to meet.
Said I to this damsel: "Your family I'll foil
If you'll show me a spot to go boring for oil."

Oh, the damsel looked up and she says: "I declare
Oh, I know of a spot and I've watched it with care,
And no one has seen it since I was a child,
And if you go there I am sure you'll strike oil."

So I fondly embraced her on the very top floor.
I hugged and I kissed her a thousand times o'er,
And I lifted her garments for fear they might soil;
Then she showed me that spot to go boring for oil.

Well, I scarcely had bored in six inches or more
When the oil from her well so freely did pour,
And she looked up at me and she said with a smile:
"Come down on your auger—I'm sure you've struck oil."

Although comparatively modern, that follows a traditional folk-song
pattern, and was probably composed by an Irishman: the "child" and
"smile" rhymes indicate that oil was pronounced "ile." Mr. Howard said
he had heard it in Drumheller, Alberta, in 1919. Ellen Stekert
collected it in 1958 from a man in his eighties living in Steuben
County, New York, who thought he had learned it in the lumberwoods of
northern Pennsylvania. His seven stanzas included a first and a last
one that Mr. Howard did not sing, but the others were quite similar.
Frank Hoffman collected it from Hiram Cranmer, an ex-lumberjack from
north central Pennsylvania, who had learned it from other lumberjacks
before World War I. Both the other versions mention "Oil City" in
place of Calgary as the locale.

1966. "A Sampling of Bawdy Ballads from Ontario" by Edith Fowke in
Bruce Jackson (ed.), Folklore and Society: Essays in Honor of
Benjamin A. Botkin, (Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates).