The Devil's Song- Baird (TX) c. 1920 Owens
[From: TEXAS FOLK SONGS by William A Owens 1950. Owens heard this song circa 1920.]
Excerpt from James Ward Lee, "OWENS, WILLIAM A.," Handbook of Texas Online:
OWENS, WILLIAM A. (1905–1990). William A Owens, folklorist, author, and professor, was born in the Lamar County hamlet of Pin Hook about twenty miles northeast of Paris on November 2, 1905. He was the son of Charles and Jessie Ann (Chennault) Owens. His father died within a few days after Owens's birth, and the boy spent his early years helping his mother and his older brothers scratch a living from the worn-out red soil of Lamar County.
His education was spotty in his early years, for he was never able to go to school for more than a few months at a time, and, as he tells in his first volume of autobiography, This Stubborn Soil (1966), the school at Pin Hook was only open about three months a year. Owens learned to read and write, and when he met a poorly-educated crosstie cutter who owned twenty-five books that he was willing to lend, young Bill read all the tiehacker's books and resolved to devote his life to reading and study.
At the age of fifteen he moved to Dallas to live with an aunt and work, on rollerskates, filling catalog orders at Sears and Roebuck's huge mail-order warehouse. Later, he found a job washing dishes for a Catholic school and saved enough money to attempt study at East Texas State Normal College in Commerce (now Texas A&M University—Commerce). Despite his lack of education, he made a high score on the entrance exam and was allowed into the college's high school program in 1924. These early years are detailed in This Stubborn Soil. The filmmaker James Lipscomb turned some of the early material from This Stubborn Soil into a PBS television program entitled Frontier Boy.
In the second volume, A Season of Weathering (1973), Owens tells of his years teaching school at Pin Hook and other East Texas schools beginning in 1928, working in the Kress store in Paris, taking courses at Paris Junior College, and ending up at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees in 1932 and 1933 respectively. His master's thesis, published as Swing and Turn: Texas Play Party Games (1936), grew from all the years Owens had spent hearing and singing the old English and Scottish ballads that were a part of his East Texas heritage. "Play parties" were the dances of religious fundamentalists who forbade dancing to music unless it was without fiddles, guitars, and other instruments.
As Owens tells in his third volume of autobiography, Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song (1983), he spent much of the 1930s collecting folksongs, teaching at Texas A&M University, and completing his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. Working partly on his own and partly for the Extension Division of the University of Texas, he recorded songs from East Texas to the Cajun Country of the Texas Coast to the Mexican border, using a secondhand Vibromaster recorder. The records were played with bamboo or cactus needles. Owens later worked closely with J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek.qqv Bedichek was the director of the Extension Service's Interscholastic League and Owens's employer for part of his time as a collector of songs. Owens's close relationship with "the old three" led to his publishing Three Friends (1969), a collection of letters that Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb wrote to one another. It also includes a running commentary by Owens on his relationship with the three men. A later book that grew from his folklore-collecting days was Tales from the Derrick Floor: A People's History of the Oil Industry (1970), which he edited with Mody C. Boatright, Dobie's successor as secretary–editor of the Texas Folklore Society.
As Owens notes in Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song, he entered the University of Iowa in 1937 after he failed the entrance examination at the University of Texas. Encouraged by Professor Edwin Ford Piper, he took his folklore collection to Iowa and turned it into his dissertation, later published as Texas Folksongs (1950), a book still in print. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1941, and he claims that one of the influences on his writing there was the painter Grant Wood. Owens drove for Wood and learned from him something about cleanness and clarity of style.
THE DEVIL'S SONG
When I was fifteen I worked part of a year as a farm hand for Ulysses S. Swindle of Lamar Counry. During the summer a young lady named Bessie Baird came to visit from Navarro County. We soon discovered that she knew a song about the devil, but she was afraid to sing it for fear Mr. and Mrs. Swindle would not like it. One night the Swindle children and I got her in the kitchen, closed all the doors and windows, and made her sing the song. I still remember how shocked we were at hearing the line, "If the devil won't have her I'll be damned if I will." I wrote the words down that night and memorized them and the time.
Many years later I learned that this song, as "The Farmer's Curst Wife," was an old British ballad. The Texas version is quite similar to British versions, except chat the language is American and more vigorous. Sung by William A. Owens.
There was an old man who owned a farm,
Hi hi diddle um day,
There was an old man who owned a farm,
And he had no cattle to carry it on,
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
He yoked two pigs to pull the plow,
Hi Hi diddle um day,
He yoked two pigs to pull the plow,
And if he did it the devil knows how,
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
The devil came to him in the field one day,
Hi Hi diddle um day,
The devil came to him in the field one day,
Saying, "One of your family I will carry away,"
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
"You can't have my oldest son,"
Hi Hi diddle um day,
"You can't have my oldest son,
For the work of the farm must still go on,"
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day'
"You can have my scolding wife,"
Hi Hi diddle um day,
"You can have my scolding wife,
But you can't keep her to save your life,"
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
He packed her up all in a sack,
Hi hi diddle um day,
He packed her up all in a sack,
And he looked like a peddler a-packing his pack,
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
Six little devils a-climbing the walls,
Hi Hi diddle um day,
Six little devils a-climbing the walls,
Saying, "Take her back, Pappy, 'fore she kills us all,"
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
Six little devils a-dragging their chains,
Hi Hi diddle um day,
Six little devils a-dragging their chains,
saying, "Take her back, puppy, 'fore she beats out our brains."
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
He packed her up all in a sack,
Hi Hi diddle um day,
He packed her up all in a sack,
And like a damn fool went carrying her back--
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
The old man was lying sick in bed,
Hi Hi diddle um day,
The old man was lying sick in bed,
She took off her shoe and beat him on the head,
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.
The old man went whistling across the hill,
Hi Hi diddle um day,
The old man went whistling across the hill,
Saying, "If the devil won't have her I'll be damned if I will,"
Singing twice fi dum fi diddle fi dum fi day.