Hoosen Johnny: A Song History
Carl Sandburg printed "Hoosen Johnny" in The American Songbag (1927), placing it in a section called "The Lincolns and Hankses" with a piano arrangement by Alfred G. Wathall.[1] Sandburg's headnote ties the song to Abraham Lincoln: he writes that Lincoln often heard it sung by lawyers of Illinois's Eighth Circuit gathered at tavern and hotel stoves on winter nights, and that it was a favorite of Lincoln's banjo-playing friend Ward Hill Lamon.[1] He then quotes at length from The Illini by Clark E. Carr, who, Sandburg notes, came to Illinois in 1852 and was among the first settlers of Galesburg.[1]
After a model by Giambologna, Bull, bronze, 18th–19th century. Shown for the bull of the song; it has no connection to Illinois.
Carr's The Illini (1904) is, by its author's own account, a mix of fact and fiction about Illinois from 1850 to the opening of the Civil War, and in it the narrator hears the song from Black roustabouts gathered one evening on the forward lower deck of a Mississippi steamboat.[2] As Carr tells it, a leader improvised the verses while the whole group answered in chorus, which he judged "superb" when good voices carried it.[2] He adds that the song became a favorite of lawyers riding the circuit, and passes on, as hearsay, a story that a court at Knoxville, in his own county, once adjourned on some welcome news while judge, lawyers, jury and spectators paraded around the public square singing it.[2]
The Traditional Ballad Index files Sandburg's "Hoosen Johnny" under "The Old Gray Mare (I)," an entry whose same-tune list includes "Old Abe Lincoln Came Out of the Wilderness."[3] Its notes keep the little-black-bull song in that family while leaving open whether the two are one song that diverged or two songs that merged.[3] Shelley Stevens includes it in Jamming With The Baritone Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel collection of thirty-six tunes for baritone dulcimer in ADA tuning, written out in standard notation and tablature with chords.[4]
Sources
- Internet Archive: "Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (1927)", pp. 164-165.
- Internet Archive: "Clark E. Carr, The Illini: A Story of the Prairies (1904)", ch. XXVI, pp. 110-113.
- Traditional Ballad Index: "The Old Gray Mare (I)".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Jamming With The Baritone Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: After a model by Giambologna, Bull, bronze, 18th–19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.