The Drunkard's Song- White (TX) c.1920 Owens Bronson 17
[From: TEXAS FOLK SONGS by William A Owens 1950. Apparently this is the sanitized version, see also Reed Smith's SC version. Appears as Bronson 17.]
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 DRUNKARD'S SONG- Sung by Mrs. White, Lamar County, Texas.
I learned this song as a child [b.1905], from the Whites who lived near my family in Lamar County. Mrs. White sang it as I have set it down here. Her two sons, several years oider than I, sang it with obscene substitutions for such phrases as "blind old fool." My mother once overheard me singing their words and washed my mouth out with soap and ashes, unwittingly making it certain that the words would stick in my mind. I can still hear them singing, " 'Oh, you fool, you God damned fool, you son-of-a-bitch,' said she."
An old man came home one night
As drunk as he could be,
And saw a horse standing in the barn
\Where his own horse ought to be.
"Oh, my wife, my darling wife,
Now tell me how this can be?
There's somebody's horse standing in the barn
Where my own horse ought to be."
"Oh, you fool, you blind old fool,
Oh, cain't you plainly see?
It's your own brindle cow standing in the barn
Where your own cow ought to be."
"Oh, my wife, my darling wife,
Now tell me how this can be?
There's somebody's hat hanging on the rack
Where my own hat ought to be."
"Oh, you fool, you blind old fool,
Oh, cain't you plainly see?
It's your own black hat hanging on the rack
Where your own hat ought to be."
"Oh, my wife, my darling wife,
Now tell me how this can be?
Somebody's head's in bed with you,
Where my head ought to be."
"Oh, you fool, you blind old fool,
Oh, cain't you plainly see?
It's nothing but a cabbage head
My mother gave to me."
"I've traveled up, I've traveled down,
Ten thousand miles or more,
But hair growing on a cabbage head
I never saw before."