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thay say that thay can convict me
but that is but a scair

thay say that I must go to tomstown '
but I don't think I will be thair.

of corce I am in jail now

whare I have ben twice before
and when I get clear this time
I hant coming any more

I have been put hear falsely I feal
from the bottom of my heart

and when I serve three sentences so
I think I have done my part.

now my frends I have no reason
to write a lie

nor not a word of this

will I device

for every word is true

just as sure as my name
is Wilbur Day.

The Wesley Shackers created much disturbance in the early eighties in Washington County by breaking the game laws and committing other acts of lawlessness. The name 'Shackers' probably referred to their living in rude camps, or shacks. This poem - for poem we have to grant it to be is interesting for its revelation of the writer's mental processes. Unlike the ordinary criminal song, which is made up by some one else about the prisoner, and presents him either as a bold hero or as sentimentally bewailing his fate, the Wesley shacker is reviewing the facts dispassionately; under cross-examination he will 'find himself' and be hard to catch off his guard. Cool, wary, determined, this illiterate shacker has personality; he is as little as possible like the stock criminal of the 'lamentations' and 'murder tunes'; the hunter breed he sprang from stands out curiously sharp in his calculation of the chances against him.

1 Tomstown of course is Thomaston, site of the State Prison.

JIM CLANCY

Taken down August, 1925, from the singing of Horace E. Priest, of Sangerville, Maine, who learned it about forty-five years before in the woods on the Penobscot. As the water-works and its dam at Bangor were begun in 1875 and completed in 1876, the song had made its way into the woods in about five years.

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To Bangor City last year I came,
To the town I took a fancy,
I enlisted above in the Water Works
'Long of my friend Jim Clancy.

Jim he didn't stay but a day or two,
While I stuck on like a daisy.

Bad luck to me soul! had I gone with Jim
My poor heart would ha' been aisy.

One Saturday night I got my stamps,
For Brewer town I started,

I met a man and he asked me to drink,
Said I, 'You're very kind-hearted.'

I took a drink of the lay-down punch,
Which laid me out complately.
Sometimes I git a leetle mite drunk,
But that night I got bastely.

When I awoke my stamps was gone,
In another hotel I was sitting;

My bag and baggage was my only chum,
An' my bedroom door was grating.

I loudly for the boss did call,

My stomach bein' in want of a diet,
When a man, with a start, to me did appear,
Sayin', 'Damn your eyes, keep quiet!'

I was taken to court that very afternoon
And charged for creatin' a riot;
They said I had knocked a policeman down
While tryin' to keep bein' quiet.

8 I told the story to the judge
To the best of my recollection;
He fined me fifty cents and cost

9

ΙΟ

Or six months in the house of correction.

My stamps bein' gone, so I had to go too,
A-makin' brick for the stack, boys;
It was all on account of the lay-down punch,
Or the meeting of those hoboes.

And now, young men, when you do go out,
If you have got any money,

Keep away from the lay-down punch

And the hoboes for their cunnin'.

'Jim Clancy' must have been a very local song. A song so true to the place and the period could have been made up nowhere else than in Bangor in the seventies, when lumbermen, river-drivers, sailors, stevedores, brickmakers (locally called 'mud-larks'), and the dam-builders working on the great water-works dam across the Penobscot, found life along the water-front vivid and highly entertaining. It is not forgotten yet how one whose verses are found in this volume once rode a horse into certain saloons on one of Bangor's principal streets, and, when remonstrated with by a policeman, picked the officer up bodily with one hand and was about to ride off with him, when bystanders, by diverting the rider's attention, gave the officer a chance to escape.

HOW DAN GOLDEN MADE UP A NEW SONG WHEN I asked Dan Golden what was the name of his song, he said: 'It don't have no name; you can call it "Old Dan Golden His Journey Out." But others call it 'John Ross.'

That was twenty-three years ago. At least ten years before that I had found in print two lines of an old woods song, no more than the words,

'Go you quick-er-ly to the shady vales of 'Suncook
And swamp them logs for me.'

'What is the rest of that?' I asked Mr. Golden; 'do you know who wrote that?' It was a shock to find the distinguished author present in person. One of the definitions of a ballad laid down by the master was that the author of a popular ballad shall have been dead a long time and his work must be strictly anonymous.

'Well, don't you know that song?' inquired Mr. Golden. 'Why, that's the song me an' my brother Hughey wrote. Hughey, you see, he was my brother

dead now; he got his thigh broke in a log-jam up on Rockabema; know where that is? ever heard of Rockabema? Been there, have you? Well, he got his thigh broke trying to save another man that was all under water; logs rolled and caught him, you see. We made up that song together, and that is a good song. I'll sing that song to you. And I could dance it right out here, if I didn't have on my thick boots.'

But before singing he prefaced his song with a bit of personal history. 'My name is Daniel H. Golden when you write anything about me again, you will put in my name, won't you? I was born in Paisley, Scotland, and I come to this country in 1865, just after the Rev'lu

tionary War.' In 1867, when he was eighteen and his wife sixteen, he married the Mary whom he celebrates in verse. Thirty-six winters he worked for John Ross in the woods 'from 1867, every winter till last winter, and how many does that make?' — and seventeen springs he drove on the West Branch Drive, besides other springs on different drives. He rose to 'handle boat,' and he had, as he himself said, 'a repitation.' I took the song down twice, once from recitation and once from singing, and the two copies differed considerably. The tune went with a heavy beat on the alternating syllables; miss that and you lose the balladry of it.

Now-ow the night that I was mar-ried, oh,

And laid on mar-riage bed,

Up stept John Ross and Cy-rus Hewes
And stood at my bed-head.

'Yes, when I wor married, that very morning I took my wife Mary and she wor only sixteen and I wor eighteen - took her to her own door in the coach an' left her there, an' I didn't see her agin for ten months; went right off into the woods to work swampin' for John Ross. I was alwers one of Ross's men, you see; worked for him every winter till last winter and was on the West Branch Drive for him seventeen springs. Got that down?'

But whither in the cold light of the facts vanishes that dramatic opening of John Ross coming in the dead of night to hale him away to the woods? In the enlightenment which comes to us from this veritable traditional song, we question how much better off we should be if we knew the whole truth about 'Sir Patrick Spens,' or 'Kinmont Willie,' or 'Edward, Edward.'

Now the night that I was married, oh,
And laid on marriage bed,

Up stept John Ross and Cyrus Hewes
And stood at my bed-head.