Down at the Station

DESCRIPTION: "Down at the station, early in the morning, See the little pufferbellies all in a row. See the stationmaster pull the little handle. Puff, puff, toot, toot, off we go!"
AUTHOR: (see NOTES)
EARLIEST DATE: 1917 (Nettleingham-TommysTunes)
KEYWORDS: train nonballad campsong
FOUND IN: US Britain
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Pankake/Pankake-PrairieHomeCompanionFolkSongBook, p. 198, "Down at the Station" (1 text)
Nettleingham-TommysTunes, #92, "Call the Roll!!!" (1 text, 1 tune)
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, pp. 112, 123, 232, 300, 417, 437, 447, 514, "Puffer Billies" (notes only, with a "parody" stanza on p. 300)
Zander/Klusmann-CampSongsNThings, p. 51, "Puffer Billies" (1 text, 1 tune)
Zander/Klusmann-CampSongsPopularEdition, p. 2, "Puffer Billies" (1 text)
BoyScoutSongbook1997, p. 31, "Down by the Station" (1 text, 1 tune)
Abrahams-JumpRopeRhymes, #112, "Down at the station early in the morn" (1 text)
Roud #10746
RECORDINGS:
Judy Cook, "Pufferbillies" (Fragment: Piotr-Archive #335, recorded 11/02/2022)
SAME TUNE:
Dewey Song (Dewy Was the Grass) (File: ACSF095A)
NOTES [193 words]: Amazing what you learn to think of as a folk song once you start compiling a ballad index! This is one of perhaps only two songs from my mother's tradition (the other being "White Coral Bells"). I had not thought of it as a folk song (in fact, for decades I hadn't thought of it at all) till it showed up in Pankake. Interestingly, Judy Cook's tune, at least, is not the one I learned, although it's pretty clearly related.
In 1948 Lee Ricks and Slim Galliard copyrighted "Down by the Station"; Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I -- Chart Detail & Encyclopedia 1900-1949, Paragon House, 2000, p. 497, estimates that this was the fifteenth most popular song in America in February 1949; it was recorded by Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, and the Slim Galliard Trio. That song is clearly related to this -- but it appears that Ricks and Galliard took the traditional chorus cited above, added the verse, changed the sound effects, and copyrighted the whole thing. So the chorus is probably legitimately "folk." And Nettleingham-TommysTunes has a different longer version with a different chorus which comes from World War I. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: PHCFS196

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