Songnotes

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M|N|O|P|R|S|T|U|W|

A Companion to the Old Town School Songbook

Compiled and edited byMark Dvorak.

Hard and It's Hard

“Hard and It's Hard” is Woody Guthrie’s re-working of an older lament called either, “There is a Tavern in the Town” or “Beautiful Blue Eyes.”
Woody remembers: “...When I got out of jail, I made a run for a bottle of liquor and a pretty woman. I met her in a saloon, I had a couple of shots under my belt and was rarin’ to step. She was one-eyed, but that didn't matter none. I had two eyes and she looked mighty good to me through both of ‘em. I felt like a man coming up out of the grave when I stepped out of that jail. I had seventy dollars saved up and would have blowed seventy one hundred, if I’d of had it, just for a crack at that one-eyed girl. Her one eye was as pretty as a picture.
“So I slipped my guitar into position and I played her my old Okie love song. You might think it was a funny kind of a serenade. You might think it was too hard boiled and sad to soften up a woman’s heart. But that woman was pretty hard boiled and sad herself. She had her heart broke as many times as my uncle’s wheat field, and it was broke every spring in planting time. She didn't want no mushy, sissyfied, jukebox lullaby, she wanted a song as real as the oak bar she was leaning against. So I rattled out my old song about how hard it is to love someone who never did love you, and by the end of the first chorus she was smiling through that one eye of hers. And there are a lot of choruses to that song.”

Source: The Folk Songs of North America, Alan Lomax, Doubleday.
Recordings on File by: Woody Guthrie, The Weavers, Eric Weisberg.

Hard Times Come Again No More

This Stephen Foster masterpiece of 1855 capitalized on the popularity of Charles Dickens’ novel, Hard Times. It is said to be based on a melody Foster heard as a boy attending the church of his black nurse. It has been recorded many times by an incredibly wide range of singers, and was one of the songs sung most often by Foster in his last, hard days.

Recordings on File by: Emmy Lou Harris, Cindy Mangsen, Jody Stecher.

Hard Travelin'

About his song, “Hard Travelin’,” Woody Guthrie wrote: “I was born in western Oklahoma and drug up in the Texas Panhandle. That's where the wheat grows, where the oil flows, where the dust flows and the farmer owes - where you hunt for wood and dig for water - where you can look farther and see less - where there's more weather and less climate, more crops and less groceries than any other dadburned place in the universe.
     “Then the dust storms come. Dust was so thick you sometimes found yourself runnin’ your tractor and plows upside down. Where the buzzards had to wear goggles to fly backwards. You could easy lose your wife and wake up huggin’ your mother in law. Sometimes that dust would settle, but the debt wouldn't.
     “I decided it would be better in California, so I kissed the family goodbye and swung into a Santa Fe cattle car and whistled down the line. For the last few years I've been a rambling man. From Oklahoma to California and back, by freight train and by thumb - I've been stranded and disbanded, busted and disgusted with people of all sorts, shapes, sizes and calibres - folks that wandered all over the country, looking for work, down and outers and hungry half the time. I slept with their feet in my face and my feet in theirs, with Okies and Arkies that were rambling over the states of California and Arizona like a herd of lost buffalo with the hot hoof and the empty mouth disease. Pretty soon I found I had relatives under every railroad bridge between Oklahoma and California.
     “Walking down the big road, no money, no job, no home, no nothing, nights I slept in jails, and the cells were piled high with young boys, strong men and old men. They talked and they sung and they told the story of their lives - how it used to be, how it got to be, how the home went to pieces, how the young wife died or left, how Dad tried to kill himself, how the banks sent out tractors and tractored down the houses. So somehow I picked up an old rusty guitar and started to picking and playing the songs I heard and making up new ones about what folks said.”

Source: The Folk Songs of North America, Alan Lomax, Doubleday.
Recordings on File by: Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie with Cisco Houston & Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger.

Hobo's Lullaby

One who travels and dreams is called a tramp and one who travels and drinks is called a bum. Only one who travels and works and is self-sufficient can count himself, or herself, as a member of the elite family of hoboes. To be sure, hoboes are not homeless and there are still plenty of them around. And there is a considerable body of lore and music that surrounds the hobo philosophy, lifestyle and culture.
     The phenomenon of the American hobo began as the Civil War came to a close and many soldiers were dismissed from their units on the spot and told to go home. Tens of thousands of these men, who had become skilled at living off the land for months, sometimes years at a time, had no homes to return to. Looking for work or adventure, they traveled about an expanding nation and an ad hoc sub-culture of itinerant laborers made up of war veterans began to emerge.
     As most of the work they engaged in had to do with farming, the term “hoe boys” was first used to describe the temporary labor force. The racially connotative “boy” was changed to the more elegant “beau” and finally shortened to “bo.”
     As America industrialized in the decades following the Civil War, so did the hobo culture grow. As a code of ethics, a language, a dress code and a loose sort of government were all adopted throughout the network of jungle camps that followed the expanding railway system, so did a thriving aural tradition of music and poetry also take root.
     When the Great Depression of the 1930s came, scores of men once again hit the road en masse. One of these men was Woody Guthrie from Okemah, Oklahoma, who learned “Hobo's Lullaby” from hobo Goebel Reeves. Woody loved the song and called it his favorite. The tune is the beautiful and sentimental Civil War lament, “Just Before the Battle, Mother.”

Sources:

Done and Been, by Gypsy Moon. Indiana University Press.
“Hobo Times,” Newsletter of the National Hobo Society.

Recordings on File by: Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Fred Holstein, Pete Seeger.

Home on the Range

“Home on the Range” was first published around 1911, but for twenty years attracted practically no national attention. In the early 1930s all three radio networks picked up on the song and it was broadcast nightly for two or three years solid. It is said to have been sung on the doorstep of Franklin D. Roosevelt's home by a group of newspaper reporters the night he was first elected President. Consequently Roosevelt often referred to it as his favorite song.
Folklorists have traced the origins of “Home on the Range” to various, unrelated sources that date into the mid 1800s. No one is really sure who first composed the lilting tune or captured the pastoral imagery in lyric. As a folk song, “Home on the Range” is a tried and true American classic.

Source: Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
Recordings on File by: Gene Autry & Roy Rogers, Pete Seeger.

Horse Named Bill

Carl Sandburg’s ears were well-tuned to the sounds of midwestern life. He found rhythm in everyday language and discourse in nonsense rhymes like “A Horse Named Bill.” In his renowned collection, The American Songbag, Sandburg cites several sources for the lyrics of this song which are sung to the melody, “Dixie.”

Source: The American Songbag, by Carl Sandburg. Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich.
Recordings on File by: Bob Gibson, Carl Sandburg.

A Final Note…