Green New Chum, The

DESCRIPTION: "Come all of you assembled here, Just listen for a while... you can see with half an eye That I'm a green new chum." The singer went mining, had many troubles and little luck -- and now, with experience, looks and laughs at the next green new chum
AUTHOR: probably Charles R. Thatcher (1831-1878)
EARLIEST DATE: 1970 (AndersonStory)
KEYWORDS: mining hardtimes humorous
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Anderson-StoryOfAustralianFolksong, pp. 27-28, "Green New Chum" (1 text, 1 tune)
Anderson-GoldrushSongster, pp. 76-77, "The Green New Chum" (1 text, 1 tune)
Anderson/Thatcher-GoldDiggersSongbook, pp. 9-10, "The Green New Chum" (1 text, 1 tune)
NOTES [164 words]: For brief background on Charles Thatcher's career, see the notes to "Where's Your License?" For an extensive collection of his songs, see Anderson-StoryOfAustralianFolksong.
According to Bruce Moore, Gold! Gold! Gold! A Dictionary of the Nineteenth-century Australian Gold Rushes, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 100, which quotes a portion of this song, although "New Chum" was at first a generic term for inexperienced arrivals in Australia, in the gold fields it meant specifically "A novice digger, a newcomer to the goldfields."
Another verse refers to the new chum buying a claim that the owners said was rich, but on which he found nothing.
Of course you know they'd peppered it,
The gold was all a hum.
They'd sold it me because they saw
I was a green new chum.
Moore, p. 111, says "to pepper" was to "fraudulently introduc[e] samples of the minerals sought" (usually gold, of course). This was also known as "salting," which is the more common term outside Australia. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: AnSt027

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