Edited by Azizi Powell
This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series that provides two article excerpts about the Old Time music song "Rockabout My SaroJane" (also given as "My Saro Jane" and similar titles.)
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2024/11/reclaiming-black-influences-on-united_18.html for Part II of this series. That post showcases YouTube examples of the United States old time music song "Rockabout My SaroJame" vy Uncle Dave Macon, by The Kingston Trio, and by Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs.
"Rockabout My SaroJane" is categorized as an Old Time Music song and a Bluegrass music song. My position is that Black Americans should reclaim our role in the creation of and contribution toward both of these American music genres.
The content of this post is presented for historical, folkloric, educational, entertainment, and aesthetic purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to the original composers and singers of this song. Thanks to the singers/musicians and collectors who have kept this song alive. Thanks also to all those who are quoted in this post.
-snip-
This post is part of an on-going pancocojams series about Black Americans reclaiming our influence on the United States' Old Time Music genre.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2020/03/black-influences-minstrel-influences-on.html for the 2020 pancocojams post entitled "Black Influences & Minstrel Influences On The Songs That
Old Time Music Performer Uncle Dave Macon Sung & Played".
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TWO ARTICLE EXCERPTS ABOUT THE SONG "ROCKABOUT MY SAROJANE"
These online sources are given in no particular order and are numbered for referencing purposes only.
SOURCE #1
https://www.lizlyle.lofgrens.org/RmOlSngs/RTOS-RockSaroJane.html "Remembering The Old Songs: ROCK ABOUT MY SARO JANE" by Lyle Lofgren
(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, May, 2010)
"In the March issue, I wrote about Hold That Woodpile Down, a
steamboat roustabout song. Here's another steamboat song that would have been
lost were it not for Uncle Dave Macon. This one (Vocalion 5152, reissued on
Uncle Dave Macon Classic Sides, 1924-1938, JSP CD 7729) was recorded by Uncle
Dave on the same day in 1927 as Woodpile, with the same Fruit Jar Drinker
sidemen: Sam & Kirk McGee and Mazy Todd. I assume Macon also learned it
from traveling entertainers when he was young.
Here's some speculation about what a couple of the terms mean: "rock," used in the sense of rhythmic movement (with sexual connotations), has a long history of usage in ebonics, dating at least to the middle of the 19th century. It's probably a good assumption that Saro Jane is a person, not a boat.
The reference to "hole in the wall" in verse #3 may be about Hole-In-The-Wall Plantation, which was a large cotton plantation a short distance upriver from Natchez. There was once a river landing there of the same name, and Mark Twain mentions it in Life on the Mississippi (chapter 8) as an area where depth measurements were important, so perhaps it means that the boat ran aground there. That interpretation would be consistent with the misfortunes mentioned in the verse #2, where the experienced captain is no longer around to pilot the boat.
I found no reference to a steamboat named MacMillan*, but the last verse dates the song to the American Civil War, and indicates that the narrator plans to (or already has) run off to join the Union side in the battle. Both sides in that conflict converted freight and passenger steamboats into gunships in the hard-fought battle for control of the Mississippi River.
Whatever the meaning, it's fun to sing. There are very few traditional songs that have both a refrain and a chorus, as well as a minor chord. You'll have to listen to the original to figure out how to do Uncle Dave's complex 3-finger banjo picking — it's way beyond me.
[...]
Complete Lyrics:
1. I've got a wife and five little chillun,
Believe I'll take a trip on the big MacMillan,
Refrain:
Oh Saro Jane!
Oh, there's nothing to do but to set down and sing
Oh rock about my Saro Jane.
Chorus:
Oh, rock about my Saro Jane,
Oh, rock about my Saro Jane,
Oh, there's nothing to do but to set down and sing,
And rock about my Saro Jane.
2. Boiler busted and the whistle done blowed,
The head captain done fell overboard,
Refrain
Chorus
3. Engine gave a crack and the whistle gave a squall,
The engineer gone to the hole in the wall,
Refrain
Chorus
4. Yankees build boats for to shoot them rebels,
My musket's loaded and I'm gonna hold it level,
Refrain
Chorus
[Note added 12/21/2010: I received an e-mail from Les Caraher with the following information, which seems to me a prime candidate for the Big MacMillan.]:
I read your article on Uncle Dave Macon's Rock About My Saro Jane. Your speculation about the source of the phrase the big MacMillan intrigued me. So, I did a little bit of research on the internet and came up with an alternative source for the phrase. In the article you mentioned the questionable assumption that Uncle Dave remembered phrases correctly and he may have, but if the song is a civil war era song then a lot of folks had to remember things accurately before Uncle Dave got a-holed of it. So, here is my speculation.
It turns out there was a boat that plied the Mississippi all during the civil war as a supply boat. It was called the MOSES McLELLAN. It is not hard to imagine that name changing to the big MacMillan is it?
Here is the reference.
[Note added 6/7/2013: More ideas about the Big MacMillan: I received an e-mail from William Lewis with the following information]:
Just wanted to add my thoughts on Uncle Dave’s Rock About My
Saro Jane and the origin of the McMillan reference. I always thought McMillan
refered to a boat. However, I have never come across a steamship with that name
(not to say there wasn’t one). According to the Country Music Hall of Fame,
Uncle Dave said he had learned the song from black stevedores on the Cumberland
River in the l880s. In the mid-19th century, the Cumberland River supported
a large riverboat trade which reached to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers."...
-snip-
This is my bold font. That quote doesn’t use bold font for that sentence, but
uses it for other sentences in that particular note.
**
A sound file of Uncle Dave Macon performing "Rockabout My SaroJane" is showcased in Part II of this pancocojams series.
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SOURCE #2
https://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/09/rockabout-my-saro-jane.html
Friday, September 10, 2010
"Rockabout My Saro Jane"
Rivers seem to play a larger part in American folk music
than they do in that of just about any other country. Sure, there are some
Irish folk songs about the Shannon, and the Scots' "Flow Gently, Sweet
Afton" is a standard; students of French probably remember singing
"Sur le pont d'Avignon," and I have no doubt that the Rhine and the
Volga and the Yang-tze and all the other big rivers have inspired some
folkloric response.
But consider the rivers of America and the scores of songs they have inspired. The Hudson. The Chattahoochee. The Potomac. The Shenandoah. The Ohio. The Rio Grande. The Arkansas. The Red. The Wabash. And the Father of Waters himself, the Mississippi...and those are just the high profile waterways that have songs attached to them.
I
suppose that reflecting on the very old "John Webb" song last week is
part of what prompted me to pick "Rockabout My Saro Jane" for this
week. I hadn't really thought much about the song for many years until
recently. Last April when I was profiling Lou Gottlieb and his arrangement of
"Good News", I remembered a passage from folk historian Ronald
Cohen's Rainbow Quest that I used in the linked article and cite again here -
Gottlieb told Cohen that
I had a wife and children and no money so I started working as a stand up comic and got a job at the Purple Onion. There were three guys there who used to hang around the Hungry i all the time. In fact, they'd be in the dressing room half the time. But they were cute....They were the opening act at the Purple Onion...Well, sir, these kids really had something different. There was a magic about that act that was hard to explain. When they made their first record...they needed a tune. I had a couple of old charts from the Gateway Singers that I quickly re-scored for three voices. They sang a song I stole from Uncle Dave Macon called "Rock About My Saro Jane" and put it on their first album. And they let me publish it. The royalties ultimately came out to thirty grand.
Here is Uncle Dave's recording from which Dr. Lou derived the arrangement to which he refers, courtesy of Chicago area roots expert Jeremy Raven:
Gottlieb was referring, of course, to the
wet-behind-the-ears boys who were forming the Kingston Trio, and his
arrangement of "Saro Jane" was a rousing opening number to the second
side of that first album. I promptly forgot about the song (after remembering
that I had indeed enjoyed it greatly) until late one night at the recent Trio
Fantasy Camp in Arizona. A bunch of us were playing a few old KT songs in the
Burns/Askins Hospitality Annex when Bob Shane and his wife Bobbie walked in and
sat down to listen and sing along. Bobbie requested two songs that she said
rightly that no one ever seemed to play at the camp, Stan Wilson's "I
Bawled"...and "Saro Jane." Play them we did, and I was struck by
what a fine arrangement Gottlieb had come up with and how much fun the song
was.
As is obvious in the lyric, "Saro Jane" is a
roustabout or stevedore's song from the Mississippi River. Alan Lomax also
cites Uncle Dave Macon as the source, asserting that Macon learned the song in
1887 from black workers on the Cumberland River docks in Nashville but
maintaining that the song was much older, probably of Civil War vintage. The
late Rod Cook specialized in covering Macon's tunes and style - here he is with
some absolutely first-class clawhammer on the song:
[...]
In introducing "Saro Jane" in his Folksongs of
North America, Lomax says that our country's interior rivers have been
"pathways of folklore and song...made by men who shouted in triumph as the
loads were hurled down, made by men who were driven by their own unbridled and
beautiful strength to bring melody and rhythm...to the breast of the great
rivers."
That's unusually poetic for Lomax - but it seems to me to
fit perfectly for "Saro Jane" and a few dozen similar songs."...
-snip-
I added the bold font to highlight that sentence.
**
A drawing of a Black stevedore (dock worker) is shown at the top of this article.
**
A sound file of The Kingston Trio singing Lou
Gottlieb's arrangement of "My SaroJane" is showcased in Part II of this pancocojams series.
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This concludes Part I of this two part pancocojams series.
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