The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #45184   Message #669972
Posted By: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
15-Mar-02 - 10:47 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: All Go Hungry Hash House (Dave Macon)
Subject: Lyr Add: THE BOARDING HOUSE
The All-Go-Hungry Hash House (Boarding House) may go back to the 19th C. A version was collected in Arkansas that was said to have been learned in 1895.
The ambilonious cheese may originally have been "antediluvian." There are other differences; it will be easier to reproduce the entire song.

THE BOARDING HOUSE

There's a boarding house where I stay
That is turning my hair gray,
And the landlord is always full of beer.
The beds the bugs have rented
And the room is sweetly scented
By an old-fashioned tan-yard in the rear.

The doughnuts they are wooden,
We have cast-iron puddin',
We kneel and pray before we go to bed;
And if you would get a breeze
Of that antediluvian cheese,
You would think that someone hit you over the head.

We have India-rubber pickles,
Exercise them on bicycles, (bi-sick'-ells)
A dinner bell or gong we can't afford.
The minute they open the gates,
We rush in on roller skates,
At that all-go-hungry hash house where we board.

Our molasses are made of paint.
If you smell them you would faint.
They are green and dished out in a gourd.
The bread is full o' cracks.
You couldn't cut it with an axe,
At that all-go-hungry hash house where we board.

The big fat cook we call the duchess
Brings the coffee in on crutches.
The buckwheat cakes's like sponges petrified.
The pies are old and gray.
They were tackled by a jay
Who went right out and committed suicide.

The sausage it was marked.
If you'd touch it, it would bark.
The steak you couldn't cut it with a sword.
The eggs were brought to match.
If you'd shake them they would hatch,
At that all-go-hungry hash house where we board.

When we sit down to eat, we stutter.
There are whiskers in the butter.
The cheese comes from old Bingen on the Rhine.
All day yesterday we were tryin'
To get a skeleton for a sign
At that all-go-hungry Hash house where we board.

Sung by Laura Wasson, Elm Springs, Arkansas, 1942. "She learned it somewhere near Elm Springs, about 1895." The pronunciation "bi-SICK-ell" for bicycle was common from Oklahoma to Texas, Arkansas, and much of the border states area when I worked there in the 1950s.
Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, ed. and abridged by Norm Cohen, 1982, Univ. Illinois Press, pp. 371-373.