The Hog Drivers' Play-Song and Some of Its Relatives
by Edmund Cody Burnett
Agricultural History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Jul., 1949), pp. 161-168
THE HOG DRIVERS' PLAY-SONG AND SOME OF ITS RELATIVES
EDMUND CODY BURNETT*
[* Dr. Edmund Cody Burnett passed away in Washington, D. C., on Jan. 10,1949. He reviewed the edited copy of the article here printed but did not see it in proof. Dr. Burnett was a charter member of the Agricultural History Society. He attended many of its Washington meetings and contributed the following articles to Agricultural History: "The Continental Congress and Agricultural Supplies"( 2: 111-128, July 1928); "Hog Raising and Hog Driving in the Region of the French Broad River" (20: 86-103, April 1946); "Shingle Making on the Lesser Waters of the Big Creek of the French Broad River" (20: 225-235, October 1946); "Big Creek's Response to the Coming of the Railroad: 'Old Buncumbe' Promotes the Better Life in a Rural Community" (21: 129-148, July 1947); "The Passing of the Old Rail Fence: A Farmer's Lament" (22: 31-32, January 1948); and the article here printed.-Editor.]
Not so many years ago the American people suddenly waked up with the realization that they had lost something out of their lives. It was the ballad and the play-song, which from time immemorial had been part and parcel of their way of life. The play-song had for generations uncounted been the voice of the jollity and frolicsomeness of youth; the ballade, with its keynote of regret, disappointment, even the tragic, attuned to the more serious moods, gave solace and consolation to those who had passed their youth, or were bidding it goodbye. Forthwith there was hurrying and scurrying to recover, if may be, these jewels from the dust heaps of memory. But alas and alack! The awakening had come a generation too late. The golden bowl had been broken; the pitcher broken at the fountain. The searchers did, indeed, recover an immense heap of fragments. But who could call back the good life that was?
It is one of the many keen regrets of my life that I myself had probably an unequaled opportunity of preserving a rare cycle of old English ballads but was aroused only after it was too late. About midway in the decade between 1870 and 1880, a boy of fifteen or sixteen years of age came from out the foothills of the valley in which I lived (the valley now known as Del Rio, Tennessee) to work on our farm. It fell to my lot-I was younger than he by five or six years-to spend most of my waking hours with this youth, John Burgin by name, through one spring and summer. From John's first day on the farm I learned that he was fond of singing and that he had a good round resonant voice. Whatever he might be doing, whether plowing or hoeing, whether hauling rails or wood or forking manure, he sang almost incessantly. I think he even sang when chopping stovewood, though from my experience chopping requires an undivided lung power. As a matter of course, when hauling with our famous yoke of white oxen, Buck and Dick, or plowing with Old Bill, a stubborn cuss of a mule, John would need frequently to break a line of song in mid-air with commands pertinent to the occasion; then speedily he caught the broken line of the song where he had left it and went on as if nothing had happened. For one thing John had a repertoire of "protracted meeting songs," he called them, evangelistic songs then much in vogue in our country. He was particularly fond of the songs of P. P. Bliss and told me that this great singer evangelist had lost his life in a railroad wreck a few years before at Ashtabula, Ohio. I had heard of the Ashtabula disaster, for a cousin of mine had been killed in that wreck.
But John took to protracted meeting songs only in certain moods. What he had a genuine passion for was old English ballades, "song ballets," he called them. I had not then heard of the famous collection of Francis James Child, but when, a good many years later, I made its acquaintance, I was convinced that John held most of that collection-and many more-in his memory. Before the summer had ended John must have sung through his repertoire of ballades many times over; but in the early days, when he had sung one I had not heard before or which especially had caught my fancy, I would ask him, "John, where did you learn that song?" His reply was invariably: "I larnt hit from maw. D' you know, she used to sing more songs nur anybody you ever hearn tell of, till she jined the church, and atter that she wouldn't never sing none of 'em no more."
There was one particularly plaintive ballade that John was fond of singing-when he was in the mood for it-and I verily believe he could wring tears out of a pineknot. It is no fantasy of memory to say that, when that song, as John sang it, resounded through the valley, a hushed silence fell upon the crows hiding in the pine thicket back of the field. Then, when he had finished, the cawing broke out with redoubled vigor, and the crows, with one accord, scampered across the valley to another hiding place they had on the farther side. I had an exceptionally retentive memory in those days, and I felt secure that both the song and the tune would abide in my memory forever. But alas! Though the tune has survived, only a snatch of the words remains. I have not found any trace of it in any collection of ballades; therefore I am persuaded that "maw" must have been both the author and composer. Here it is, my bequest to posterity:
One moonshiny night, when the stars they give light,
And me and young Johnny was a fixin' to take a flight,
Our waiting maid, a-standing by, so plainly to see,
She ran to my mither and told apon me.
My feyther conveyed me to a room all up high,
Where no one could I see nor no one passed me by,
Nor no one could I see nor no one passed me by,
Nor no one could I see to hear my mournful cry.
Years passed, and when I found myself trying to recover the songs I had once thought were so securely lodged in my memory I could remember only snatches of them here and there. I resolved to seek John out and try to stimulate him to a repeat performance. "Well," he said meditatively, "I believe I did sing a lot in them days. But I haint sung a song in twenty year. Lawsy massey, man! I've got a wife an' seven children, and if that won't take the music out'n a man I don't know what will." It was hopeless. His mother, the fountain from which John had drawn his inspiration, had passed on some years before; and John followed her not long afterward, still a young man.
From one circumstance I infer that my father (though a minister and supposed to purge his mind of that sinful stuff) probably had a well-stored memory of ballades. (He died when I was not yet full grown.) That circumstance was that he was wont to take the four younger children on his knees before the fireside and sing to them his own version of Lord Lovell and Lady Nancy. I don't doubt that he knew other ballades, but the rollicking tune of Lord Lovell, as he sang it, appealed especially to him as a nursery rhyme. I have never found in print quite the version of the tale as he told it, and nowhere have I discovered his own variation of the tune, particularly in the last line.
They buried Lady Nancy in the white churchyard;
They buried Lord Lovell in the choir.
And over her grave grew a sweet white rose,
And over his grave a briar-riar, riar;
And over his grave a briar.
When he came to the last line he sang it with such relish and gusto that the flock of infants on his knees burst out laughing. Another circumstance lends support to my conjecture. The late William H. Whitsitt, for many years president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville, Kentucky, related, in the introduction to his popular lecture on Burns, how he was first drawn to the Scotch poet. My father was a classmate and also a roommate at Union University, then located in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
On one occasion, Dr. Whitsitt explained, this roommate of his regaled him with a recital of Tam O'Shanter. Dr. Whitsitt declared that before the recital had ended he was rolling on the floor convulsed with laughter. My father's maternal ancestry was Scotch, and I know from other sources that Burns was a favorite in the family, scarcely short of the Bible.
If I have been lamenting my sin of failure to take opportunity by the forelock, it behooves me at long last to do deeds meet for repentance. At one of the earlier meetings of the Agricultural History Society I announced a purpose to write, as best I could, the story of hog driving in East Tennessee; but again I let opportunities, one after another slip by, waving its forelock at me, until all the old hog drovers I knew had passed on-except one, J. W. D. Stokely, the intimate friend, from whom I drew the greater part of the details of the story. Fortunately he survived until he had read, with immense gratification, the record to which he had so largely contributed.' Then he too passed, at the ripe age of nearly eighty-two years.
A recognition that the play and the song here considered were an essential, if also a secondary, feature of the history of hog driving set me about an effort to recover from old timers the verses lost in my memory as well as the mode of the play. The tune, as I had heard it sung time and time over again, I perfectly remembered. It was not Edmund Cody Burnett, "Hog Raising and Hog Driving in the Region of the French Broad River," until I had recovered the song as sung in our community of hog raisers and hog drovers and hog drivers that I learned that a good many other people were pursuing the same end, so far as the play-song was concerned, as well as many of its likes about to sink without trace. Versions of the song began to be printed, and presently the Library of Congress was assembling recorded versions of the song as remembered by old timers wherever they could be found.
THE HOG DRIVERS' PLAY-SONG
Incidentally, the recorders have failed for the most part to record the geographic wanderings of the singers. Very few of the recordings were made in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, the region par excellence of hog driving; they have largely been derived from Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, without indication of where the singer froliced in his or her youth. There was a great migration from East Tennessee to Texas in the years following the Civil War, when hog driving was at its height, some to Arkansas, but the Mississippi instances can not so easily be accounted for.
I was just past five (or may be it was six) years old when I first heard the song at a party at our house. Though my father was a minister he had none of the inhibitions respecting youthful frolic such as dominated most ministers of that time. He rarely joined in the game, but often he made some contribution of his own to the fun. On this particular occasion, I well remember, when there seemed to be a lull in the gaiety, he told a story of a boy who suddenly burst into a neighbor's house out of breath and exclaimed: "Mr. Jones, Pap sent me down to borry a chop axe, to saw some boards, to make a chicken coop, to put our dog in. He runs off all the neighbors' cows, so that we can't git a drap of milk to put in our coffee."
Briefly, the method of playing the game was to have a boy and girl, representing the tavern keeper and his daughter, sitting side by side, whilst the players, matched promiscuously, marched round and round the tavern keeper and his daughter, singing:
Hog drivers, hog drivers, hog drivers are we,
A-courting your daughter so fair and so free.
Can we get lodging, here, oh here?
Can we get lodging here?
The tavern keeper responded:
I have a fair daughter who sits by my side,
But no hog driver can get her for a bride.
You can't get lodging here, oh here;
You can't get lodging here.
The hog drivers plunged forward again in their march, answering angrily:
Fair is your daughter, but ugly yourself;
We'll travel on farther and seek better wealth.
We don't want lodging here, oh here;
We don't want lodging here.
The daugher whispered to her father; he held up his hand, stopped the march, and apologetically responded:
This is my daughter, the pride of my life;
And [Johnny Smith] can get her for a wife.
He can get lodging here, oh here;
He can get lodging here.
As we sang the song there was only one variation of consequence. The first two lines, depending on who was leading the singing, were often varied to:
Hog drivers, hog drivers, hog drivers we air,
A-courtingy our daughters o free and so fair.
The great majority of the versions, recordings or otherwise, follow this reading, except the second line ends in "rare" and "fair." The majority of the versions also use "hog drovers," instead of "hog drivers," pointing to the owner, the management, rather than to the hired man who simply drove his allotted bunch of hogs.
The widest variations are in the particularity of the snub to the tavern keeper. One such went:
"Don't care for your daugher, much less for yourself.
We'll travel on apiece farther and better ourselves."
Or:
"I'll bet you five dollars we better ourselves."
One of the earlier forms was: "A fig for your daughter, a fig for yourself." This was the opportunity for any genius to offer a bigger and better snub than ever before.
There is little variation in the tavern keeper's gracious response offering his daughter to Johnny Smith, except that in some versions he coupled the offer with a proviso: "By choosing another to sit by my side." Or: "By bringing me a prettier one here, oh here; by bringing me a prettier one here."
Thereupon the erstwhile companion of Johnny Smith, whose place had now been taken by the tavern keeper's daughter took the seat beside the tavern keeper. She was expected to do this in any case, whether invited or not. The process was kept up until all the players had been matched.
Indeed it was the primary function of the play in many gatherings to match the boys and girls for some other game. However, as our folks played the game, it was for the pure fun of the play itself. Outside of East Tennessee, perhaps, some extra stimulus may have been required to induce the adoption of the hog-driver's play, but in East Tennessee it was a "natural." East Tennesseeans took to it as a duck to water.
Just when the play was introduced into the country I have not been able to ascertain. Evidently the tune, with words adapted to different local circumstances, was an early importation. And the same appears to have been true as the play-song spread beyond the region of hog driving.
Some localities, even after the play-song had become accepted as a play particularly adapted to the hog-drover's way of life, preferred the title Swine Herders. One version with this title was dug up, of all places, around Asheville, North Carolina. [2] No western North Carolinian or East Tennesseean, to the manor born, would ever voluntarily use the term "swine herders." It must have been some Yankee school teacher of the missionary infestation of forty or fifty years ago who fastened "swine herders" on some unsuspecting community, just as they put grown boys and girls through the kindergarten process because they had had no prior training.
Probably the earliest form known is the song of the Three Knights from Spain:
Here come three knights all come from Spain,
We have come to court your daughter Jane.
The mother responded:
Turn back, turn back, ye Spanish knights,
And rub your spurs till they are bright.
Our daughter Jane, she is too young,
She has not learned the Spanish tongue. [3]
There is yet to develop the flippant retort from the tavern keeper that "no hog driver can get her for a bride." Meanwhile in the development of the song before it invaded the American scene, a retort probably more than flippant had developed.
THE HOG DRIVERS' PLAY-SONG
One collection gives four versions of the earlier song which developed into the song called Hog Drovers, the four being slight variations of each other: [4]
Here come three sailors, three by three,
To court your daughter, a fair laydee.
Can we have a lodging here, here, here?
Can we have a lodging here?
The three sailors were rejected; then came three soldiers, who were likewise rejected; finally came three kings. The mother relented:
Yes, here is my daughter, all safe and sound,
And in her pocket a thousand pound,
And on her finger a guinea-gold ring,
And she's quite fit to walk with the king.
Presently the three kings returned with the daughter:
Here is your daughter, safe and sound,
And in her pocket no thousand pound,
And on her fingern o guinea-goldr ing,
She is not fit to walk with the king.
The other versions vary mainly with the identity of the suitors-tailors, bakers, tinkers, etc.- but always end with three kings. The anticlimax to the courtship evidently did not appeal to American tastes.
When the song was first adopted by playparties in America, it seems to have been sung to every variety of Old World characters who might come a-courting-sailors, soldiers, tailors, tinkers, rich merchants, kings-but tended to find a suitor adapted to the mode of life in the particular community.
And, whatever the variation of suitor or circumstance, almost invariably there is the inquiry:
Can we find lodging here, O here?
Can we find lodging here?
In the McDowell collection of Folk Dances in Tennessee, there is a nearly perfect version of the Hog Drivers song as sung in East Tennessee, under the title of the Five Tinkers. [5]
Strange to say, amongst the variations in some communities (it never invaded our community) was the practice of finishing out the hog-driver's play with some verses borrowed from the play, Old Sister Phoebe. Some commentators speak of Sister Phoebe as sung to the tune of Hog Drivers. The tunes do blend into one another faciley, but the structure of Sister Phoebe is different, and it has a cycle of variations all its own. There are numerous versions of this play-song, some called simply Sister Phoebe, but most of them are entitled Old Sister Phoebe (for what reason she was called "old" does not appear). Apparently the most authentic version begins:
Heigh-ho Sister Phoebe, how merry were we,
The night we sat under the juniper tree;
The juniper tree, heigh-ho.
As sung in our neighborhood, however, "juniper tree" was replaced with "June apple tree." Our folks knew nothing about a juniper tree, so they pictured the couple sitting under a June apple tree, munching luscious June apples. It is related that "Preachers preached against 'Sister Phoebe' from the pulpit, and good people refused permission for their daughters to play the game; though it was hard for anyone present to keep out of it wherever it was played. It seems that moral pressure did, however, stop it; for it was in the discard long before many other games of the old-time play party." [6]
Just why the preachers should have stormed so loudly against Sister Phoebe is difficult for the present generation to conceive; maybe because it provided for a kiss (many another play did that), as instance the verse:
Take this hat on your head, keep your head warm,
And take a sweet kiss, it will do you not harm;
But a great deal of good, I know, I know;
But a great deal of good, I know.
It may, however, have been because of the connotations of such lines as these in some versions:
Oh, Brother Simon, how merry were we,
That night we lay under Job Holland's peach tree;
Job Holland's peach tree, heigh-ho.
Job Holland ran out with his old rusty gun,
And swore that he'd shoot us if we didn't run.
The way we scratched gravel, heigh-ho, heigh-ho;
The way we scratched gravel, heigh-ho.
Following the invitation to Johnny Smith or Bobby Jones to take the tavern keeper's daughter and welcome-"If he will bring me another one here, oh here, If he will bring me another one here." -there was a general response:
Rise you up, Bobby, and choose you a wife,
Make the best choice that you can for your life.
So rise you up, Bobby, and go, oh, go.
So rise you up, Bobby, and go.
It was never my good fortune to see Sister Phoebe played at any time. There was good reason for it to be marked with taboo. Just before my playconsciousness dawned, there had been a great "churching" of the young people in our community for playing Sister Phoebe, which had sent shivers down the spines of the young people and set outsiders to tittering, even to guffawing. I was in time to hear from an interested observer on the back benches an authentic account of the whole affair.
After all wars there is a rebound of youthful spirits, and our young people, after being pentup by the War Between the States, seem to have broken loose in an orgy of Sister Phoebe. It was none of the church's business what nonmembers played, but all members were gently admonished that playing Sister Phoebe was considered a sin, and they must come before the church, acknowledge their sins, ask forgiveness of the church, and be restored to full fellowship. A special session was set apart after the regular Sunday service.
The pastor invited all who had acknowledgements to make to occupy front seats-and the response was impressive. The pastor addressed the young man who sat at the end of the first bench on his right:
"Brother John, you wish to make acknowledgements to the church?"
"Yes, Sir."
"What sin have you committed to which you wish to acknowledge to the church?"
"I played Sister Phoebe."
"Do you wish to ask the church's forgiveness and to be restored to full fellowship?"
"I do."
"Brethren and Sisters, you have heard Brother John's acknowledgements. What is your pleasure?"
"I move he be forgiven and restored to full fellowship."
"I second the motion."
"You have heard the motion that Brother John be forgiven and restored to full fellowship in the church. All in favor of the motion say, aye."
A few scattered male voices said, "aye." Women did not vote in the church. "Opposed, no." There were no noes. "Brother John is restored to full fellowship in the church."
In our church the males invariably sat on the left side of the church (the preacher's right), the females as invariably on the right side of the church. The preacher next addressed himself to the girl who sat on the end seat at the left of the aisle. "Sister Lizzie, you have come to make your acknowledgements to the church and ask to be forgiven and restored to full fellowship?" It was an exact repetition of the proceedings pertaining to Brother John. She acknowledged that she had played Sister Phoebe and was duly restored to full fellowship in the church. So it went down one line and down the other, till the twenty-five or thirty young people, who one after another confessed to playing Sister Phoebe had been restored to full fellowship.
Even in my day there was memory of gnawing hunger before the trial was over, but according to my informant, men, women, and children stuck it out until the last little Jimmie and little Jane had confessed to playing Sister Phoebe and had duly by vote of the church been restored to full fellowship therein.
My informant, by the way, was a Confererate soldier who had been absent (actually a prisoner of war in Camp Chase and Fort Delaware) and therefore was not personally concerned. He was accordingly young enough to take a completely sympathetic view with the young culprits and was fond of reciting the whole episode with dramatic glee. That churching stuck in the memory of the community for years afterward, like cockleburs to woolen breeches. Sister Phoebe was never played again.
THE HOG DRIVERS' PLAY-SONG
Even when hog driving was at its height, even when thousands of hogs were ferried over the river in full sight of our schoolhouse and driven up the river toward the South Carolina slaughter pens, I am inclined to think that the hog-drivers play-song did not have priority over another song in our repertoire of play-party games. This was known as The Shores of Tennessee. The play, with variations, had a wide acceptance, but nowhere else, I am persuaded, was it played with such fervor as along the shores of the great river which gave the State its name. Just how it came to be marked with the line, "And march along the shores of the Old Tennessee," has been lost to history. The game had appeal because it was patterned after the old square dance, and it had a good smacking kiss at the climax. Two lines, boys on one side, faced each other. From one end a boy and a girl broke loose, marching down the outside of the lines singing:
I'll weep and I'll mourn, and great will be my cry;
I've lost my true love, and surely I shall die.
Just then they spied each other at the other end of the line, whereupon in unison the two exclaimed:
Oh yonder she [he] comes; Oh howdy, howdy do;
And how have you been since I parted from you?
And now for a kiss, and I know we shall agree,
And march along the shores of the Old Tennessee.
It was resoundingly patriotic, and that was why, I am persuaded, that parents were loath to object to the kissing climax, as they did in other plays. The last season of frolic in which I personally participated some genius of our tribe found a device for circumventing the church prohibition against dancing. He (or she) introduced amongst us a most admirable substitute for square dancing, which was named Wild Irishman. Few of us had ever danced, even so much as the Old Virginia Reel, and it did not occur to us that we were on forbidden ground. Till one night a pillar of the church visited our frolic. He sat observant through one round, then as he got up to go, he remarked to me, with a twinkle in his eyes (he was adear old uncle of mine):
"It would just as well be called the Old Virginia Reel as Wild Irishman."
It was in the late eighties that the Wild Irishman had its flourishing career. Hog driving, as a business, had come to an end a few years before, and with that end also came an end to the play-song Hog Drivers. Indeed, the era of the play-party was over.
It is true that the great majority of the playsongs originated among our ancestors of England, Scotland, and Ireland (I know nothing about the play-songs prevailing amongst other elements of our population) and were adapted to the life of the community to which they were imported; but there was another series of plays largely built around native experiences. Usually there was a play built of the experiences of each of our wars. There was, for instance, the play recalling the War of 1812, which began:
I have my knapsack on my back,
My gun upon my shoulder;
I'm going down to New Orleans
To be a gallant soldier! [7]
The Mexican War was glorified in the play:
We had a little fight in Mexico.
If it wasn't for the girls,
The boys wouldn't go.
Singf ol-de-rols, ing fol-de-ray.[8]
Another verse, reminiscent of war, but which one is not quite certain, reads:
The war now is over,
And peace upon the land;
Now can't you give us joy by
The raising of your hand? [9]
The parodies the Yankees made on Dixie were not so much play-songs as taunts. It was definitely a taunt that my father encountered, when, fresh from the hot Rebel ground of southeastern Alabama, he visited his plantation in East Tennessee, at the moment when Tennessee was lining up with the Confederacy. Some one had parodied or metamorphosed Dixie into "a sprightly abolition ode," which Brownlow's Knoxville Whig had published, and what better to greet this Rebel than Dixie turned wrong-side-outwards? A group of Union sympathizers, calling themselves the "Home Guard," chanted it in his ears. The refrain was:
"I'm glad I'm in the Union." "
Somewhere in the "Middle Division" of the State about the same time another parody of Dixie had been turned out unmistakably by red-hot Rebels:
If you'll go with me to the Devil's den,
I'll show you the bones of Lincoln's men.
Look away, look away!
From Lincoln's land,
Away down South in Dixie. [10]
At the time my father said that as yet his own family had not split asunder on the issues of the war. But he had not long to wait. Families divided asunder like chestnut burs; and the final proof of it was the neighborhood school into which I was thrust soon after the fighting war was over a school composed mainly of cousins of different degrees, about half of them double first-cousins and we youngsters began to fight the war all over again. But as I remember it, it was the most amicable bunch that ever fought a war.
FOOTNOTES
2. William Wells Newell, Games and Songs of American Children (New York and London, 1903), 232-234.
See also BenjaminA lbert Botkin, The American Play- Party Song, with a Collection of Oklahoma Texts and
Tunes (Lincoln, Nebr., 1937), 205-209.
3. Alice B. Gomme, Old English Singing Games (New York, 1900), 43-45.
4 Alice B. Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland... (London,1 898), 2: 282-289
5 Lucien L. McDowell and Flora Lassiter McDowell, Folk Dancesi n Tennessee; Old Play Party Games of the
Caney Fork Valley (Ann Arbor, Mich., Edwards Bros., 1938), 8.
6 Ibid., 15.
7 Ibid., 18.
8 Cf. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Our Singing Country... (New York, 1941), 66-67; and Botkin, The American Play-Party Song, 233. This play, according to a relative, Mrs. Henrietta Burnett Marlar, was imported by her into our community from Texas.
9 In McDowell, Folk Dances in Tennessee 5, 6, this verse is attached to the song entitled Yonder She Comes, and quoted under The Shores of Tennessee.
10. I have given additional data on these two songs in the Georgia Historical Quarterly, 21: 194 (June 1937).