Keating Town

DESCRIPTION: "Whoever comes to this curst place, Starvation waits him here. This is not fit for man or beast, Or birds of prey, I swear."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1931 (Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania)
KEYWORDS: hardtimes food
FOUND IN: US(MA)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania, "Keating Town" (1 fragment) (p. 155 in the 1919 edition)
Roud #15006
NOTES [192 words]: It's not clear to me why Shoemaker calls this "Keating Town"; as you can see, there are no geographic references in his fragment. There is no obvious reason why Keating, Pennsylvania would be infertile; the town is at the junction of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River and Sinnamahoning Creek, so there is water, and the photographs show it as green from the air.
It may not have been so in the past, however. According to Susan Q. Stranahan, Susquehanna: River of Dreams, John Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 153-154, the Sinnamahoning was an area once heavily logged, leading to extensive erosion and silting-up, and it was also in a coal mining area, which meant that the runoff was highly acidic and polluted. The Keating area was probably heavily affected in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
It's interesting that it's only about ten miles downstream from Sinnamahoning, Pennsylvania, which gets thoroughly smeared in another piece in Shoemaker, "All Is Vanity, Saith the Preacher." Maybe it's just that the Sinnamahoning area had some anonymous local equivalent of Larry Gorman who would give vent to sarcasm about anything he saw.. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: Shoe216A

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography