Picayune Butler, Is She Coming to Town

DESCRIPTION: Minstrel song, with chorus "Picayune Butler, Picayune Butler, Is she coming to town?" In traditional forms, the lyrics float, e.g. the terrapin and the toad, "My ole missus promised me When she died she'd set me free."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1925 (Scarborough); a song by this name was in existence by 1847, and Foner-AmericanLaborSongsOfTheNineteenthCentury claims it was published around that year
KEYWORDS: floatingverses slave animal travel
FOUND IN: US
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Scarborough-OnTheTrailOfNegroFolkSongs, pp. 164-165, (no title) (1 text)
Foner-AmericanLaborSongsOfTheNineteenthCentury, p. xiii, "(Picayune Butler)" (1 excerpt)
NOTES [330 words]: Wolf-AmericanSongSheets, #C130B, p. 193, "Picayune Butler" ("Old Fuss and Feathers, as we knew before") uses the tune "All on Hobbies," but I have no idea if the two songs are related.
The broadside version was sufficiently well-known that Abraham Lincoln was reported by the newspapers to have known it, and asked to have it sung, in 1862. The report was, however, part of an attack on him by his political enemies, and the man who was said to have been asked to sing it denied the story. See Boller,, pp. 119-120.
It is possible that this song was sung at the same event as the one where "Oh! Susanna" had its world premier. According to Morneweck (Stephen Foster's niece), p. 313, there was in the September 11, 1847 Daily Commercial Journal an advertisement for Andrews' Ice Cream Saloon promoting a concert which featured, in addition to "The Old Iron City," "Away Down Souf," "Allegheny Belle," "The Floating Scow," and "The gal wid de blue dress on," the song "Picayune Butler" and "SUSANNA -- A new song, never before given to the public" (Morneweck, p. 314). One of the performers at this event was Nelson Kneass, who wrote the standard tune for "Ben Bolt."
I have no idea if it is significant, but there was a South Carolina senator named (Andrew) Pickens Butler (1796-1857). Could "Picayune Butler" be a feminization of his name? According to his entry in the DAB (volume II, pp. 355-356), he was a lawyer and, as a member of the South Carolina legislature, a supporter of John C. Calhoun. He was himself chosen for the Senate in 1846, re-elected in 1848, then again in 1854. He was the Senator whose quarrel with Charles Sumner cause Butler's nephew Preston "Bully" Brooks to beat Sumner senseless with a cane in 1856. Sumner's attack rose out of his support for the infamous pro-Slavery Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The Civil War general Benjamin F. Butler was known as "Old Picayune"; I seem to recall reading, somewhere, that he was so nicknamed because of this song. - RBW
Bibliography

Boller: Paul F. Boller, Jr., Presidential Campaigns, second revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1984-2004
DAB: Dumas Malone, editor, Dictionary of American Biography, originally published in 20 volumes plus later supplementary volumes; I use the 1961 Charles Scribner's Sons edition with minor corrections which combined the original 20 volumes into 10
Morneweck: Evelyn Foster Morneweck (Stephen Foster's niece), Chronicles of Stephen Foster's Family, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1944

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File: ScaNF164

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