Hold the Woodpile Down

DESCRIPTION: Original and floating verses: "Saw my love the other night/Hold the woodpile down/Everything wrong and nothing was right...." Chorus: "But I was a-travelling, travelling/As long as the world goes round/For the backyard shine on the Georgia line/Hold...."
AUTHOR: Originall Words: Edward Harrigan, Music: David Braham. Later verses probably written by Uncle Dave Macon
EARLIEST DATE: 1887 (appearance in Harrigan-Braham musical "Pete")
LONG DESCRIPTION: Original and floating verses: "Saw my love the other night/Hold the woodpile down/Everything wrong and nothing was right/Hold the woodpile down"; "Gave her a little kiss to make her happy/Gave me a little love lick and in came her pappy"; "Come to town the other night/Heard a lot of noise and seen a big fight/Police running and jumping all round/Load of moonshine done come to town"; "Down in the packinghouse, stole a ham/Folks don't know how bad I am/Carried it home and I laid it on the shelf/I'm so bad, I'm scared of myself." Chorus: "But I was a-travelling, travelling/As long as the world goes round/For the backyard shine on the Georgia line/Hold the woodpile down."
KEYWORDS: courting drink humorous nonsense floatingverses
FOUND IN: US(SE)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Finson-Edward-Harrigan-David-Braham, vol. II, #139, pp. 199-200, "Haul the Woodpile Down" (1 text, 1 tune)
Cohen/Seeger/Wood-NewLostCityRamblersSongbook, pp. 210-212, "Hold That Woodpile Down" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #4443
RECORDINGS:
Charles A. Asbury, "Haul the Wood Pile Down" (CYL: New Jersey Phonograph Company, no #, c. 1891; on Protobilly)
Uncle Dave Macon & his Fruit Jar Drinkers, "Hold That Wood-Pile Down" (Vocalion 5151, 1927; on Protobilly)
New Lost City Ramblers, "Hold That Woodpile Down" (on NLCR03)
Sam Patterson Trio, "Haul De Woodpile Down" (Edison 51644, 1925)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Roll the Woodpile Down" (chorus)
NOTES [1040 words]: This song is a conundrum. The verses are pure minstrel (Uncle Dave played minstrel shows in his youth), but the chorus is almost identical to that of "Roll the Woodpile Down," a chanty from African-American riverboat workers: "Rolling, rolling/Yes, rolling the whole world around/That brown gal of mine's down the Georgia line/And we'll roll the woodpile down." Other versions of "Hold the Woodpile Down" say, "Black gals shine on the Georgia line", which is closer to the chanty form. -PJS
I'll admit that, based only on the traditional versions, I would have classified this as a "Dave Macon-ised" version of "Roll the Woodpile Down" -- but Paul has probably examined the matter more than I have. However, the key point is that it seems to have originated with the Harrigan/Braham song "Haul the Woodpile Down." (For background on Harrigan and Braham, see the notes to "The Babies on Our Block.") This perhaps then gave rise to "Roll the Woodpile Down," which Dave Macon converted to "Hold the Woodpile Down."
Probably the song is mis-split. But I'm talking about the Harrigan song here, since it's enough of a mess that I don't want to fiddle any more.
Franceschina, p. 185, says that "The work song 'Haul the Wood Pile Down' is another fine example of [David] Braham's pseudo-spiritual numbers... with an imaginative juxtaposition of major and minor modes." As for what a work song is doing in a Broadway musical, the plot of "Pete" (premiered November 20, 1887; Moody, p. 260) will make that clear:
"In Pete, Harrigan returned to the melodramatic entanglements of his early plays. Colonel Coolidge has inadvertently married twice. His first wife has given him a child unbeknownst to him. His second wife is after his fortune. He's called up to join his regiment, is killed, and when the second wife tries to claim the plantation, she's foiled by his child Mary Morgan with the assistance of Old Pete [who is black]. The telltale document is the original wedding license. The witnesses' names have been shot away, but Pete has retrieved the wad from the bullet, with the names! It took three hours and ten minutes to ravel and unravel the story, explore related sub-plots, exhibit both threatening and entertaining spectacles, and introduce slavery songs and spirituals" (Moody, p. 176). According to Moody, p. 173, it was a "new kind of play."
Franceschina, p. 184 describes the play this way: "Based on an earlier sketch, 'Slavery Days,' and set in Florida... Pete tells the melodramatic story of an African-American slave, Pete (Harrigan), whose master, Colonel Randolph Coolidge (Marcus Moriarty), has had a daughter by a secret marriage. When the colonel is killed in the Civil War, it falls to Pete to tell his daughter, Little May (Kate Patterson), what has happened to her father, and to protect her from the colonel's gold-digging wife, who wants to rob the girl of her rightful inheritance by questioning her legitimacy." The damaged marriage certificate is then described, but Pete "is beaten with a whip for his efforts [to reconstruct it] and left to bleed to death. Little May nurses him back to health and is thrown into a millpond for her kindness. Her charity does not go unrewarded, however, for Pete rescues her as she descends the millrace, proves her legitimacy, and vanquishes the villains for a happy ending.
"Local color was provided by the presence of Vi'let (Dan Collyer), a half-mad slave girl who engages in voodoo, and comedy was present in the personality of a New York alderman, Constantine Brannigan (Joseph Sparks), his maid and wife, Mary Duffy (Annie Yeaman), and his servant, Gasper Randolph (John Wild)."
Harrigan definitely worked to get into the part of Pete: "FOr another of his starring roles, that of an elderly ex-slave in Pete, Harrigan [who was based in New York] dispatched an emissary to the South, where he visited a few plantations, negotiated with some aged Negroes on them, and returned triumphantly with a trunkful of clothing that gave every evidence of having belonged to the sellers long before they had achieved freedom. Harrigan selected for himself from this beguiling wardrobe a pair of pants that was exactly what he had been looking for; it had been mended so often that it was all patches" (Kahn, p. 53).
FinsonCollected, volume I, p. xxx, has this to say about the drama:
"The faithful 'darkey' makes only one appearance in Harrigan's later output, but it is a notable one: he and Braham arranged a whole musical entitled Pete (1887) around the theme. In an interview right before the premier Harrigan claimed:
Pete is not the hallelujah negro of the ordinary drama, nor is he the negro of the mnistrel show. He is just such a negro as you find in the South to-day, and the characters around him are drawn from life. The play don't deal with slavery, except incidentally in the first act, the time of which is the day after the firing on Sumter, and it is not a war piece. The last three acts are placed 12 years after the close of the war, and the whole is wholly and simply domestic, portraying the life of negroes and white men in the south."
In another place, Harrigan referred to Blacks as "our African brother[s]" (Root, p. 58).
Finson goes on to add that "In reality Pete comes right out of contemporary popular song, which delighted in the fantasy who stays on the plantation after the war to help his former master, or in this case the master's kindhearted daughter" -- but adds that Harrigan had gone somewhat beyond the standard two-dimensional portrait of Blacks; "For one thing, African-Americans are portrayed as an ethnic group equal to any other, with their own culture and traditions of which they are proud." I would say that, if "Pete" starts from a too-common trope, Harrigan has taken it in a new direction that does genuine credit to Pete -- he is not a fool, and while he is loyal to a white person of property, the loyalty is earned and is returned. If Pete is not equal to a white man, he is more equal than in most dramas of the era. The bad guys in the play are white.
I find it a fascinating example of racial attitudes that Harrigan made Pete the hero of this story, and a definite positive role model -- and played him in blackface. - RBW
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