Dead Man's Chest

DESCRIPTION: "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest, Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, Drink and the devil had done for the rest." A combination of rebellion and civil war in a (pirate?) crew results in the death of captain, bosun, cook, and most of the rest of the crew.
AUTHOR: Allison & Waller ?
EARLIEST DATE: 1915
KEYWORDS: death homicide rebellion pirate
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Lomax/Lomax-AmericanBalladsAndFolkSongs, pp. 512-514, "The Buccaneers (The Dead Man's Chest)" (1 text)
DT, YOHOHO*
ALTERNATE TITLES:
Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest
Yo Ho Ho
NOTES [119 words]: The origin of this piece is more than usually confused. The initial quatrain appears in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), but he reports that he had it from another source. (According to David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life among the Pirates, Harcourt Brace, 1997 [copyright 1995], p. 5, the Dead Man's Chest comes from Charles Kingsley's At Last.)
In 1901, the full form of the piece is said to have appeared in a musical by Allison & Waller. Did they write it? I don't know. The Lomaxes printed their version from Seven Seas, September 1915. Apparently no author was listed.
Chances are that this is not a folk song, but it may have folk roots somewhere. - RBW
File: LxA512

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