Someone Has Been There Before

DESCRIPTION: The singer complains that he's "always late" for everything, "for someone has been there before." A shoemaker, he invents a new heel, but someone had done that before. He asks a girl to marry but "she gave me a kick... someone has been there before"
AUTHOR: Gus Williams? (source: Gus Williams's Sdill I Don't Vas Habbt Songster)
EARLIEST DATE: 1872 (Gus Williams's Sdill I Don't Vas Habbt Songster)
KEYWORDS: courting marriage rejection commerce humorous
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Guigné-ForgottenSongsOfTheNewfoundlandOutports, pp. 341-342, "Someone Has Been There Before" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: Gus Williams's Sdill I Don't Vas Habbt Songster, Robert M. DeWill, 1872 (available in the Robert Winslow Gordon songster collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress online), p. 38, "Somebody's Been Dere Before" (1 text)
Roud #24949
RECORDINGS:
Bobby O'Brien, "I'm a Poor Unfortunate Miserable Man" (on MUNFLA/Leach)
NOTES [19 words]: Thanks to Michael Taft for finding the songster version of this, which I surely would not have spotted otherwise. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: Guig341

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