The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #54404   Message #842830
Posted By: masato sakurai
07-Dec-02 - 12:02 AM
Thread Name: Steamboat coonjine songs
Subject: RE: Steamboat coonjine songs
The article at American Memory from which GUEST Q quoted songs is Coonjine in Manhattan. There's another article (The Black South in Chicago") containing a song:

"You done ask me 'bout steamboat songs. Hit bin zo long ago, an' I done jined de church sense I lef down dar, dat I mos fergit all about Coonjone. But dey wuz one song day we uster sing dat went like dis:

          Sing dis song in de city,
          Roll dat cotton bale!
          Nigger always happy
          When he gits out of jail.
          Mobile's got de wimmin,
          Boston got de beans,
          New Yawk done got flashin' swells,
          But de nigger like N'yawleens,
          Cho: Coonjine, baby, won't you coonjine,
          Coonjine, honey, is you game,
          Mammy won't lemme coonjine
          But I coonjine jus' de same!

"Sing hit fer you? Lawd, boss, I aint sung no sich song for forty years. Hit went like dis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (NOTE: He sang it, but impossible to reproduce it.)

"We useter sing dat song when I was workin' on de Alice B. Miller, runnin' up Yazoo River and sometime when I work on de Saint John, a cotton boat, dat run up Red River."

~Masato