Hide Away (Jonah and the Whale)

DESCRIPTION: Bible tales with warnings for sinners who don't heed: "Get your baggage on the deck and don't forget to take your check For you can't steal on board, hide away." Verses concern Jonah and the whale, Moses and Pharoah, (Daniel, Noah, etc.)
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1920
KEYWORDS: Bible religious warning humorous
FOUND IN: US(MW,So)
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Randolph 286, "Jonah and the Whale" (1 text, 1 tune)
Brown/Belden/Hudson-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore3 346, "Jonah and the Whale" (6 text and/or fragments, but only the "C" text is this piece; "A" and "B" are "Jonah and the Whale (Living Humble)" and "D"-"F" are "Who Did Swallow Jonah?")
Brown/Schinhan-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore5 346 "Jonah and the Whale" (3 tunes plus text excerpts, of which "C" is this piece)
Richardson/Spaeth-AmericanMountainSongs, p. 72, "There Was an Ole Fish" (1 text, 1 tune, probably a conflation -- Roud files it with #7786, "Hide Away (Jonah and the Whale)," but the form is "Few Days")
ADDITIONAL: [no author listed], Scenes & Songs of the Ohio-Erie Canal, Ohio Historical Society, 1971, "The Gospel Boat" (1 text, 1 tune; there are six verses, with the first two being traditional and the last four written by Pearl R. Nye. Nye's version does not mention Jonah -- it seems to be a river song -- but it has the "Hide away" chorus)
Roud #7786
RECORDINGS:
Ford & Grace, "Hide Away" (OKeh 45157, 1927)
McCravy Brothers, "Hide Away" (Victor V-40104, 1929)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Jonah and the Whale (Living Humble)" (subject)
cf. "Jonah and the Whale (IV)" (subject and stanza form)
cf. "Wake Up, Jonah (Jonah III)" (subject)
cf. "Who Did Swallow Jonah?" (subject)
cf. "Going to Live Humble to the Lord" (chorus: "Live humble ....")
NOTES [108 words]: There is another Jonah song, now indexed as "Jonah and the Whale (IV)," which I initially included with this song. It uses the same (somewhat uncommon) metrical pattern, and it's on the same theme; as long as I knew only one version of the other one, I suspected they were a single song. But having seen more versions, I suspect this to be a humorous rewrite of that.
All the texts, of course, are based on the Biblical book of Jonah. The humorous versions exaggerate; Cox's text stays fairly close to the actual content of chapters 1 and 2 of Jonah (except for, at times, calling the fish a "whale"; the Hebrew Bible emphatically says "fish"). - RBW
Last updated in version 5.0
File: R286

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