George Edwards (NY) 1877-1949 Cazden
[This is George Edwards from New York and informant for Cazden. A different singer, a George J. Edwards was an informant for Barry and Flanders in the early 1930s.]
Edwards was the leading informant for Cazden in his book Folk Songs of the Catskills (Norman Cazden, Herbert Haufrecht and Norman Studer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). Edwards also is found in Notes and Sources for Folk Songs of the Catskills.
[George Edwards was born March 31, 1877 in Hasbrouck, a small place on the Neversink River. George's father, Jehila "Pat" Edwards was a scoopmaker by trade but worked as an unskilled laborer. Pat loved liquor and would sing in bars for free drinks. He died in 1927. George's mother Mary Lockwood was the stable influence in his life. She was a singer, mostly of hymns. She died in 1925.
George's cousins were Charles Hinckley and "Dick" Edwards, both singers.]
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[From: Oh, Give Me a Home in the Catskills
Social Capital in a Century of Catskill Music
By Karyl Denison Eaglefeathers, PhD ]
George Edwards had his own version of “The Jam on Jerry’s Rock,” but he is most remembered for “I Walk the Road Again.” He learned this song from his father, Pat, who was a scoop maker and general laborer. This song has been called the most characteristic Catskill song and it suggests that making a living in these mountains has always been tough.
“I worked in the Susquehanna yard, we got one dollar a day,
Toiling hard to make a living, boys, I hardly think she pays,
They said they would raise our wages, if they do, I won’t complain,
I’ll get up and I’ll hoist my turkey and I’ll walk the road again.
I walk the road again, my boys, I walk the road again,
The weather be fair, I comb my hair and I walk the road again.”
-- as sung by George Edwards
George Edwards was known as an ambitious walker. In 1939, when George was over sixty years old, Herb Haufrecht took him to Columbia University to participate in a folklore symposium and to record some of his songs. When he stepped out of the hotel to buy cigarettes, George became disoriented but got his bearing by the Hudson and then walked toward home in the Catskill Mountains, some 125 miles, taking about twelve days.
More than one hundred songs were recorded from George Edwards. For some years, Edwards lived in a tenant house on Israel Slater’s farm on Thunderhill in Grahamsville, but his final years were spent at his cousin Dick Edwards’ place near Roscoe. Musicians Pat, George, and Dick Edwards came from a long line of Irish singers.
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Music of the Catskills II
Here is a second version of "Lather and Shave," this one by a Mr. George Edwards. "George Edwards is a small, gnarled, and partially invalided man who worked as a farm hand. Most of his songs, of Irish origin, were learned from his father and mother. Others were learned while lumbering... Edward's song has a distinctly Irish flavor. It is in what is generally described as Dorian mode, with a rapid rise and sustained climax (both exaggerated in performance), a drop almost to a mumble, and a short, whimsical refrain" (pg 33-34).
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NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. VIII, No. 4, Winter 1952
“WHIRLING” AND APPLEJACK IN THE CATSKILLS
Norman Studer
IN THE process of tracking down folklore in the Catskills for the Camp Woodland archives we have found that many poems as well as songs were created in the area. These poems never moved out of the valleys where they were created, and they have reference to people who in the main now rest in mountain graveyards. They are important, however, as additional testimony to the creative fertility of the "common folk,” for we have found them in every community to which we have gone.
Dick Edwards tells about the pastime of “whirling” that took place in the saloons of the Western Catskills in the Delaware River Valley, when men relaxed from hard work in the woods. “Whirling” consisted of the competitive exchange of good-natured insults in rhyme.
Pat Edwards was author of a poem about a courtship that failed. Pat was father of George Edwards, the famous folk minstrel, and a member of the clan of Edwards, Hinckleys, Conklins, and Rogers, a lusty and gregarious lot of mountaineers with ready wit, creative imaginations, and prodigious memories for old folksongs. By all who knew him Pat was described in superlatives: the best singer, storyteller, and trickster of them all. Pat was an itinerant maker of wooden scoops, a hard drinker, and jolly saloon companion. A favorite trick of his was to pick up a newspaper and pretend to read a scandalous item about some saloon habitué, the joke being that Pat couldn’t read a word. Pat knew a fabulous number of songs, and the brakemen on the 0. and W. used to persuade him to ride back and forth on their run, singing an endless flow of songs in the caboose.