Napper

DESCRIPTION: "Napper come to my house, I thought he come to see me, When I come to find him out He 'suade my wife to leave me." And similar verses about (Napper's) eccentricities: "Napper went a-huntin', He thought he'd catch a coon... He treed a mushy-room."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1914 (Brown)
KEYWORDS: humorous hunting betrayal wife
FOUND IN: US(SE)
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Brown/Belden/Hudson-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore3 123, "Taffy Was a Welshman" (3 short texts)
Brown/Schinhan-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore5 123, "Taffy Was a Welshman" (1 tune plus a text excerpt)
Scarborough-OnTheTrailOfNegroFolkSongs, pp. 102-103, "Rise, Ole Napper" (2 fragments, the first of which might be "Old Tyler" or something else; the second appards to be this but is too short for certainty and is mixed with the chorus of "Oh! Susanna"; 1 tune)
Roud #7849
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Old Tyler"
cf. "Taffy Was a Welshman (I)" (floating lyrics)
NOTES [90 words]: The notes in Brown say that these three fragments are "clearly derived from the familiar Mother Goose rhyme about the thieving Welshman [i.e. 'Taffy Was a Welshman']."
This is a very long stretch; the two have a few similar lines, but *not* the key phrases about Taffy. As they stand, I'd certainly call them separate songs, and possibly not even related.
Brown's "A" text may not be the same as "B" and "C," but it's too short to really deal with separately. The same can be said of Scarborough's miscellaneous one-sentence fragments.- RBW
Last updated in version 4.1
File: Br3123

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