The Old Bullock Dray

May 25th, 2022 | 'Banjo' Paterson, Australian folk songs, Burl Ives, Music

Bullock team hauling a load of wool, Walcha, NSW (Wikipedia)

‘The Old Bullock Dray’ is the third song on Burl Ives’ 1953 LP ‘9 Australian Folk Songs’, that did so much to spark the Australian folk revival. It is also a very difficult song to write about because of its racist connotations. (A ‘dray’ by the way is an open wagon, with no sides. I think we all know what bullocks are.)

Mark Gregory tells us, on his ‘Australian Folk Songs’ website, that ‘The Old Bullock Dray’ was first published in ‘Queensland Figaro and Punch’ on 9th November 1887, where it is introduced as an ‘Old Bush Favourite’, so presumably it had already been around for quite a while. (This was an amalgamation of two earlier newspapers – Queensland Figaro and Queensland Punch.) It was also printed in Banjo Paterson’s ‘Old Bush Songs’ in 1905. There are small but significant differences in the two sets of words.

The narrator is a shearer. The song begins with him addressing his colleagues at the end of another shearing season, telling them of his plans to settle down and raise a family. The only problem is, he doesn’t have a wife – a very significant obstacle, one would have thought, but also a very common problem for men in early colonial society. (The song is nothing if not a paean of optimism!)

Paterson explains much of the song in his introduction to it. (I don’t have a copy of the original 1905 edition of ‘Old Bush Songs’. I am referring here to the Centenary Edition, published by ABC Books in 2005, edited by Warren Fahey and Graham Seal.) The narrator (Paterson refers to him as ‘the minstrel’) explains that he has a big enough cheque to head into town and buy himself a bullock team.

And when i get a missus, boys, I’ll be all serene.
By applying at the depot. I hear there’s no delay
In getting an off-side partner for an old bullock dray.

Paterson: “Calling in at the Depot to get an offsider” – female immigrants were housed at the Depot on arrival, and many found husbands within a few hours of their arrival. An offsider is a bullock-driver’s assistant – one who walks on the off-side of the team and flogs the bullocks on that side when the occasion arises. The word afterwards came to mean an assistant of any kind.”

In the chorus, however, the narrator is now addressing his prospective wife rather than his fellow shearers. He is telling her all about the wonderful life that awaits her as his husband. The emphasis is very much on the large amount of good food he will be providing – lots of damper and fresh fish. He will also, of course, teach her how to flog the bullocks with a whip. (He also explains, of course, that they will not have a honeymoon!)

As the song comes to an end, the narrator expresses frustration that the woman at the Depot has not accepted his marriage proposal. Indeed, it appears to have been met with cold silence, and he is feeling badly hurt. He sings now instead of his plans to marry an Aboriginal woman, though it is not clear who is addressing. Perhaps he is simply singing to himself. Fighting for survival in an extremely hostile environment, their husbands very likely having been murdered, Aboriginal women were no doubt not nearly as fussy as the British women at the Depot.

We’ll have lots of picaninnies, but you mustn’t mind that,
Flash little Maggie and Buckjumping Pat,
Stringy-bark Joe and Greenhide Mike.
“My colonial,” you can have just as many as you like;

There was no old age pension in the 19th century, so having plenty of children increased your chances of being well cared for when you were told old and infirm to care for yourself.

Understandably, the word ‘picaninnies’ has been replaced by ‘girls’ in the Centenary Edition of ‘Old Bush Songs.’

The following four images accompany the 1887 printing of ‘The Old Bullock Dray’ in Queensland Figaro and Punch.

The website ‘An Australian Folk Song A Day’ tells us that the tune to ‘The Old Bullock Dray’ comes from an old American folk tune, ‘Turkey in the Straw’. This tune has been the subject of considerable controversy in recent times because it has often carried highly racist lyrics. It is also the tune often played by American ice cream trucks (I imagine in the same way that Mr Whippy in Australia is associated with Greensleeves). More information can be found here:

https://www.distractify.com/p/turkey-in-the-straw-origin

A discussion about ‘Turkey in the Straw’ on the website of Ferris State University makes the following point:

“It was a popular black-faced minstrel show song and one of the most popular sheet music covers for the song is dominated by an image of a caricatured black man.”

(Courtesy American Library of Congress)

The full article can be found here:

https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2018/may.htm

This article on the website of the American Library of Congress discusses the history of ‘Turkey in the Straw’ in considerable detail:

https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/05/turkey-in-the-straw/

(Courtesy Jim Crow Museum)

It makes the point that for much of its long and varied history, ‘Turkey in the Straw’ has not been associated with racism at all. To quote from the article:

“When the tune entered twentieth-century pop culture, it usually didn’t refer to African-American people, or at least it didn’t seem to. In fact, sometimes it didn’t refer to people at all: it was a major part of the Disney animated short Steamboat Willie, which introduced the characters of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.” It can be viewed here:

‘Turkey in the Straw’ is itself derived from an old Irish tune, ‘The Rose Tree.’ One performance of it can be found here:

The Dying Stockman

May 19th, 2022 | Burl Ives, Music, Songs

(National Archives of Australia)

‘The Dying Stockman’ is the second of nine tracks on Burl Ives’ 1953 album, ‘Australian Folk Songs’, that did so much to revive Australia’s interest in its own folk song history. It has since been recorded by many others, including Slim Dusty, Lionel Long, Dennis Gibbons, Alex Hood, The Wayfarers and the American singer, Paul Clayton.

The website SecondHand Songs reminds us that a dying person of any of a number of occupations (including that of lumberjack and sailor) issuing “a final request to comrades, including to be wrapped in work clothes” (after his death) is a common theme in folk songs.

It is certainly buried deep in the Australian psyche. Even Rolf Harris introduced his smash hit, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport”, with the following spoken word introduction:

There’s an old Australian stockman, lying, dying, and he gets himself up onto one elbow and he turns to his mates who are gathered round, and he says…

The website ‘Australian Folk Songs’ (by Mark Gregory) tells us that the song was first published in the Portland Mirror (in Victoria) in 1885, and that it was written by Horace Flower. It goes on to say:

“The brothers Horace and Charles Flower, Queensland station owners, were keen songwriters in the 1880s – 90s.”

It credits the Flowers with also writing ‘Broken Down Squatter’ and ‘A Thousand Mile Away’.

‘The Dying Stockman’ was included in Banjo Paterson’s collection of folk songs, ‘Old Bush Songs Composed and Sung in the Bushranging, Digging and Overlanding Days’, published in 1905 by Angus & Robertson. This was only ten years after the song’s first publication though it may, of course, have been written several years earlier.

Hugh Anderson devoted an entire chapbook to ‘The Dying Stockman’. It was published, together with linocuts by Ron Edwards, by The Rams Skull Press in Ferntree Gully in 1954 (a year after Burl Ives’ album). Anderson tells us that the song “is widely known in Australia as sung to the tune of ‘The Tarpaulin Jacket’, composed by Charles Coote.”

The first verse of ‘The Tarpaulin Jacket’ is as follows:

A tall stalwart lancer lay dying,
And as on his deathbed he lay,
To his friends who around him were sighing,
These last dying words he did say:
“Wrap me up in my tarpaulin jacket
And say a poor buffer lies low;
And six stalwart lancers shall carry me
Carry me with steps solemn, mournful and slow.”

The first verse of ‘The Dying Stockman’ is as follows:

A strapping young stockman lay dying,
His saddle supporting his head.
His two mates around him were crying
As he rose on his pillow and said,

Chorus
Wrap me up with my stockwhip and blanket
And bury me deep down below
Where the dingoes and crows can’t molest me
In the shade where the coolibahs grow.

Flower has done a good job of adapting the words to Australian conditions, but I don’t think it is necessary to credit him with too much creative genius.

Anderson goes on to tell us, however, that

“Coote was not inspired as a composer – he in turn worked upon an earlier original. The original of both the tune and the words for ‘The Tarpaulin Jacket’ belongs to England and Ireland. The tune of ‘Rosin the Beau’ as printed in A. E. Wier’s ‘The Book of a Thousand Songs’ (1918) and also in ‘Franklin Square Song Collection 1881 – 91’, is very similar to Coote’s song, ‘The Tarpaulin Jacket’.”

‘Rosin the Beau’ has been recorded by many folk musicians, including A. L. Lloyd, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, The Dubliners and Jim McCann, and The Corries. It begins as follows:

I’ve travelled all over this world,
And now to another I go,
And I know that good quarters are waiting to
Welcome old Rosin the Beau.
To welcome old Rosin the Beau, etc.

When I’m dead and laid out on the counter,
A voice you will hear from below,
Saying send down a hog’s head of whiskey to
Drink with old Rosin the Beau,
To drink with old Rosin the Beau, etc.

Then get a half-dozen stout fellows,
And stack them all up in a row.
Let them drink out of half-gallon bottles to
The memory of Rosin the Beau.
To the memory of Rosin the Beau, etc.

The website ‘Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music” credits ‘Rosin the Beau’ as having spawned ‘Wrap Me Up in My Tarpaulin Jacket.’ ‘The Dying Stockman’ is sometimes known as ‘Wrap Me Up in My Stockwhip and Blanket.’ Interestingly, Burl Ives also recorded ‘Wrap Me Up in My Tarpaulin Jacket’.

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library records ‘Old Rosin the Beau’ as appearing in ‘Howe’s Comic Songster’ in about 1879. The song is also very popular in the U.S., where there are many songs with the same tune. The California State University, Fresno, website notes Rosin the Beau as first appearing in sheet music published by Osbourn of Philadelphia in 1838.

Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poem ‘The Sick Stockrider’ first appeared in ‘Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes,’ a collection of Gordon’s poems published in 1870. It is a (highly detailed) variation on the theme, but ends a little differently:

Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave,
I may chance to hear them romping overhead.

(Wikimedia Commons)