Taumarunui

DESCRIPTION: "I'm an ordinary joker, getting old before my time, For my heart's in Taumarunui on the Main Trunk LIne." A hauler, he stops regularly at Taumarunui for breaks. There he meets a "Sheila" and falls in love. She changes her work hours to avoid him
AUTHOR: Words: Peter Cape (1926-1979) / Music: Pat Rogers (source: Roger Steele, editor, _An Ordinary Joker: The Life and Songs of Peter Cape_)
EARLIEST DATE: 1957 (composition date, according to Wikipedia)
KEYWORDS: love courting food rejection New Zealand
FOUND IN: Australia
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Garland-FacesInTheFirelight-NZ, pp. 41, 223-224, "Taumarunui" (fragments of the text, none complete)
ADDITIONAL: Roger Steele, editor, _An Ordinary Joker: The Life and Songs of Peter Cape_ (book with accompanying CD), Steele Roberts, Aotearoa, New Zealand, 2001, pp. 44-45, "Taumarunui" (1 text, 1 tune)
J. C. Reid, _A Book of New Zealand_ (Collins National Anthologies), Collins, 1964, pp. 222-223, "Taumarunui" (1 text)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
Cootamundra
NOTES [556 words]: Although written by Peter Cape, a New Zealander, if the song is traditional, it appears to be in Australia. According to Garland, it is found there under the title "Cootamundra." I'm assuming that changing the name of the town in which the action happens qualifies as the folk process. Similarly, Mike Harding, When the Pakeha Sings of Home: A Source Guide to the Folk & Popular Songs of New Zealand, Godwit Press, 1992, p. 3, says that "a case could be made... [that] a few 'daggy' items like 'Taumarunui'" are traditional," -- but he cites no evidence of traditional status in New Zealand. On the basis of those two facts, I've indexed the piece, but I'll admit to being dubious.
Apparently this dates back to the days of passenger railroads: The "Main Trunk" railroad from Auckland to Wellington ran through Taumarunui (in the middle of the North Island), but it wasn't much of an actual town. Plus the train only stopped there for ten minutes. So all the passengers on the rail who wanted a break had to get off at Taumarunui and visit the "refreshment rooms" catering to the rail line -- they were right next to the track, so the passengers could get off, find a counter with a meal they liked, gulp it down, and continue on.
The locals seem genuinely to have taken the song for their own; according to the New Zealand folksong site www.folksong.org.nz, when the owners were preparing to close down the rail line in 2006, local women wrote a parody that began,
We've heard the Overlander's bein' taken off the track
It's leavin' Taumarunui and it wont be comin' back
to Taumarunui, Taumarunui, Taumarunui on the main trunk line.
Also, the song is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on the town.
According to the bio included in An Ordinary Joker, p. 20, Peter Cape knew only three guitar chords, and so ended up often setting his words to tunes that he couldn't sing very well, or that were not very strong; although he sometimes set his own tunes, his most successful songs were often ones where others supplied the tunes (Phil Garland set "The Stable Lad"; Don Toms set "Black Matai"; Pat Rogers set "Taumarunui." All three, especially the first and the last, almost require four chords -- the minor second for the former, the major second for the latter). In the case of "Taumarunui," which An Ordinary Joker, p. 21, says was the first song for which Cape completed words and music, Cape's tune had too much range for Pat Rogers, who first recorded it. Rogers therefore set a new tune, and that was the one that caught on.
Apparently even the chosen town was almost an accident. Peter Cape wrote about this song on p. 40 of An Ordinary Joker, "If my friend Jim Henderson hadn't come back from Coromandel one day with a fantastic story about a little place called Whenuakite, which someone had talked about as Fenackaty, I wouldn't have started writing doggerel about New Zealand place-names. And if Fenackaty hadn't been such an impossible word to find rhymes for, I wouldn't have gone on to write a ballad about Taumarunui."
I've heard recordings of this by Phil Garland and Peter Cape's son Christopher Cape. The tunes, although clearly based on the same original, are not quite the same. How much of that is folk process and how much is Garland's tendency to tinker I don't know; I suspect it's mostly the latter. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: Garl041

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography