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The "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" section, with its noticeably different melody, is actually an older song that has been absorbed by "I've Been Working on the Railroad". It was published as "Old Joe, or Somebody in the House with Dinah" in London in the 1830s or '40s, with music credited to J.H. Cave. [ 7 ] "Dinah" was a generic name ...
Adams includes an exposition on sailors' chanties, including their melodies and sample lyrics. In this discussion he quotes "Paddy, Come Work on the Railway": In eighteen hundred and sixty-three, I came across the stormy sea. My dung'ree breeches I put on Chorus: To work upon the railway, the railway, To work up-on the railway.
Oh it's work all day for the sugar in your tay [i.e. tea] Down beyond the railway So drill, ye tarriers, drill. Our new foreman is Dan McCann I'll tell you sure, He was a blamed mean man Last week a premature blast went off And a mile in the air went big Jim Goff. [Chorus] Next time payday comes around Jim Goff was short one buck he found "What ...
A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a form of work, either one sung while conducting a task (usually to coordinate timing) or one linked to a task that may be a connected narrative, description, or protest song. An example is "I've Been Working on the Railroad".
One reportedly coded Underground Railroad song is "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd". [1] The song's title is said to refer to the star formation (an asterism) known in America as the Big Dipper and in Europe as The Plough. The pointer stars of the Big Dipper align with the North Star. In this song the repeated line "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd" is thus ...
John Henry is an American folk hero.An African American freedman, he is said to have worked as a "steel-driving man"—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into a rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel.
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In the 1920s, folklorists, notably Dorothy Scarborough (1925) and Guy Johnson and Howard W. Odum (1926), also collected transcribed versions. Scarborough's short text, published in her book, On The Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925), is the first version published under the title "Nine-Pound Hammer", before the earliest commercial recording of that name. [7]