Little Stream Of Whiskey: A Song History

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"Little Stream of Whiskey" is the title under which Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford recorded a song the Traditional Ballad Index catalogs as "The Dying Hobo" (Laws H3).[1][2] The duo cut it for Columbia in Atlanta on November 6, 1926, Burnett on banjo and Rutherford on fiddle, both singing, and it was issued as Columbia 15133-D.[1] The Index's earliest date for the song is 1912, when it appeared in The Railroad Trainman as "The Hobo's Lament," credited there to John Kern, though the Index itself treats the author as unknown.[2] The song is a hobo's deathbed scene that ends with his partner leaving by train in the dead man's clothes.[2] Several sources, the Index notes, call it a parody of "Bingen on the Rhine," and the Traditional Tune Archive reports that Charles Wolfe saw it as a parody of Caroline Norton's poem of that name.[2][3] McMichen's Melody Makers recorded it for Columbia in 1928 as "The Dying Hobo," and Kelly Harrell's 1926 Victor disc of that title, the Index notes, joins only its opening verse to a different story.[2]

Old photograph of a steam locomotive with a large funnel smokestack standing by a brick building

Pennsylvania Railroad Engine, albumen print, about 1868. A steam locomotive of the 1860s, shown for the railroad life of the song's hobo; it has no connection to the song.

The melody also lived on among fiddlers: a Library of Congress field recording in the Alan and Elizabeth Lomax Kentucky collection has Ray Skeens playing it at Wooton, Leslie County, on October 4, 1937, logged on the archive card as "The Little Stream of Liquor."[4] The Archive links the tune to western North Carolina and Kentucky, calls it a famous piece of Mount Airy, North Carolina, fiddler Tommy Jarrell, who learned it from Pate Martin and recorded it on a 1976 Mountain album, and notes that in 1930 the Swamp Rooters, with fiddlers Lowe Stokes and Bert Layne, set new words to the same tune as "Prohibition is a Failure."[3] Stacy Phillips printed a setting in the second volume of Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1995).[3] Don Pedi's Simply Old Time Dulcimer, which its description pitches as a companion for learning old-time music for dulcimer players of any level, sets it in DAD tuning.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Little Stream Of Whiskey"

Sources

  1. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix W143093. Little stream of whiskey / Richard Burnett ; Leonard Rutherford".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Dying Hobo".
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Little Stream of Whiskey".
  4. Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings: "The Little Stream of Whiskey".
  5. Don Pedi: "Simply Old Time Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Pennsylvania Railroad Engine, albumen print, about 1868. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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