Timber for the Bridge at St. Paul's

DESCRIPTION: Men go to cut logs for a new bridge. Some men cut short and some long. Some worked hard and some worked light; the smallest man did the work of two. Some cut the soft wood and others did not. The boss "told every man different from what he told me"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1958 (Guigné-ForgottenSongsOfTheNewfoundlandOutports)
KEYWORDS: work boss worker
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Guigné-ForgottenSongsOfTheNewfoundlandOutports, pp. 363-364, "Timber for the Bridge at St. Paul's" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #25332
NOTES [171 words]: Guigné-ForgottenSongsOfTheNewfoundlandOutports says of this song, "It reflects local anxiety in the community concerning poor leadership in directing the construction of a bridge over the St. Paul's river. This is revealed directly in the third stanza of the song." I would not have seen that without Guigné's guidance. I thought it was a song about a job in which everyone does his own thing, and that the writer thought that a funny situation. In any case, Guigné goes on to quote a local resident: "The bridge didn't survive long." Guigné continues, "A new bridge of steel was eventually built." - BS
St. Pauls (my atlas shows it without an apostrophe) was a small town at the southern end of Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula, in an inlet between Rocky Harbor and Cow Head. A bridge over the inlet might have been useful, but I wonder what it would have connected to -- for practical purposes, there were no roads in that part of Newfoundland in 1913; the coastal boats were their means of contact with the outside world. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.0
File: Guig363

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