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Our Singing Country |
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GO DOWN, OL' HANNAH
b®. No. 199. Ernest Williams and a group, Sugar Land, Texas, 1933. See L0.2, p. 58.
Little boyy little boyy who fooled you here? Little boyy little boyy who fooled you here? Did they tell you it was a heaven? You found a burning hell.
Little boyy you oughta knowed you couldn^t hold >emy Little boyy you oughta stayed at homey Picked uf chifs for yoy mammy And blowed yoy daddyys ho'n.
The slow-drag work songs that grew up in what the old prisoners call the "red heifer" days in the Texas penitentiary stand, along with the Negro spirituals, as the greatest American folk songs. As the hoes and cane knives flash in the sun, the plaintive melodies speak of tired bodies, aching limbs, stifling heat. The "red heifer" was somebody's jocular nickname for the cowhide lash used on the leased convicts as they rolled in the burning hell of the Brazos bottom cane fields. They were leased out by the state to individual plantation owners, and these men, according to the prisoners, weren't particular about whom they hit or who fell out with sunstroke. A "Mister Cunningham" * gets honorable mention by the convicts, and in 1904, the songs say, you ought to have been down on his place; they were finding a dead man at every turnrow. OP Hannah was beaming, and the bullies were screaming. It was an act of heroism, as the stanzas quoted above make tenderly clear, to be able to "hold 'em"—to survive.
aOP Hannah was shininy way uf there, an* we was try in3 to full her down."
* At that time under Texas law (long- since repealed), convicts were rented out as laborers to owners of large plantations. |
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