Uploaded December 2020 | Updated September 2026, 6 days ago
Day 277 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
This is the second of a trilogy from Rebecca Taylor. It comes speaking in parables joined to an air that is stately even though simple.
This has so many floating lines that I'm not even going to try to untangle them. Roud Music Index, probably on the bases of the first line, links this with "We're All Here (Do Thyself No Harm)." But the choruses are different enough that I split them.
Paul and Silas's stay in prison is related in Acts 16:19-40.
Day 277 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
This is the second of a trilogy from Rebecca Taylor. It comes speaking in parables joined to an air that is stately even though simple.
This has so many floating lines that I'm not even going to try to untangle them. Roud Music Index, probably on the bases of the first line, links this with "We're All Here (Do Thyself No Harm)." But the choruses are different enough that I split them.
Paul and Silas's stay in prison is related in Acts 16:19-40.




![You Fight On
Day 158 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
By my reckoning, we pass the halfway mark through Carl Sandburgs American Songbag. Another 157 songs to go. Cowboy songs, Mexican border songs, southern mountain songs, what Sandburg calls Darn Fool Ditties, railroad, lumberjack, and sailor songs, as well as bandit biographies, war songs, and spirituals.
Sandburg writes: Brave counsel and spacious melody for a pilgrims progress. ... A North Carolina woman at Purdue University heard this for years as a girl from a black woman cook in her home. Often when I was in the kitchen she would say to me, Come on, Miss Mary, get on de tune wagon, you aint on de tune wagon.
(from the Traditional Ballad Index) This appears to me to be based very loosely on Matt. 18:15: If a brother sins [against you], bring it to his attention when the two of you are alone. Note: the words against you are omitted by the two oldest manuscripts. RBW
Personally, I think the song combines the sentiment of Matthew 18:15 and of 2 Corinthians 10:4. Pray for peace, be prepared to fight evil.
MORE ON THE AMERICAN SONGBAG WHILE AT THE HALFWAY MARK
In 1920 Carl Sandburg (poet, journalist, and lecturer) was becoming a literary celebrity. His guitar and repertoire of songs provided a popular finale to his lecture-recitals. After each lecture, someone came up to offer new songs, or variants on those he had just sung. Sandburg would transcribe them in his own makeshift notation system, and jot down the lyrics in his pocket notebook.
Sandburg said, This whole thing is only in its beginning, America knowing its songs.”
For Sandburg, …he was discovering the American tongue in songs as well as speech,…Sandburg explored the American character and promise. He sang its history and diversity in the ever-growing repertoire of folk music.
Everywhere he lectured people flocked to him with songs. Anonymous Americans sent him songs, as did musicologists, folklorists, and friends. Robert Frost, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, to name a few.
As Sandburg sang and lectured his way around the United States and back again, his musical ragbag filled to overflowing with country songs, prairie songs, war songs, jail songs, songs of love and cities and death and nonsense. He is the last of the troubadours, the last of the nomad artists who hunted out the songs people made up, and then sang them back to the people like a revelation .... Both his singing and his search for songs are part of his belief in the essential merit of the common man.
His comment, to the publisher when the book was completed, ”I’m glad you think it looks something like a songbook as it now stands. In the jib, the boom and the peep, it aint such a bad songbook; there have been many worse.
The American Songbag was certainly a major contribution to American Music. Contemporary recording artist Dan Zanes says, “The thing I got a sense of right away was in those twenty-four chapters, Sandburg was really trying to cast a wide net. I’m somewhat familiar with a lot of the books that came out prior to the American Songbag but I’ve never seen anything that tries to be inclusive as the Songbag was in 1927.”
And Pete Seeger once said, “You might say it was a people’s education about the United States of America. What they taught in school was rather formal. [You learned the facts,] but you didn’t get the stories behind all this. And these songs gave you the stories.
(info from Penelope Nivens biography of Sandburg, as well as from the documentary The Day Carl Sandburg Died.) You Fight On](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fCGxFyLsM9E/mqdefault.jpg)
![A War Birds Burlesque
Day 271 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
First published in Carl Sandburgs The American Songbag.
Sandburg writes: In that revealing and vivid diary “War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series) by John MacGavock Grider,” we learn of a flyer in World War I whose father was a cotton mill owner and, as the diarist tells us, “There was a bomb raid on last night and the dugout was stuffy so he and I went out and crawled under a box car on the siding. It’s about as good shelter as you can get. We got to talking about home.
I asked him what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to write but his father is determined to make a horny-handed hardboiled superintendent out of him. He’s all the time scribbling now. He’s always stopping something important to jot down a plot, as he calls it, for future reference. He’s got a brief case full of them already,— plays, short stories, poems, sketches or what have you. He’s tried to read me some of them several times. ” He lost one eye, was wounded, battered, made all sacrifices asked. In an interlude of the program of hell and death, he had an affair “with a very charming young lady who more or less owed allegiance to a big diplomat. We were all kidding him about it one night and after listening awhile he retired and penned a poem [A War Birds Burlesque] on the subject. . .
Nine of the verses are presented here with the melody given them by Chicago overseas service men, Paul Boston and John Locke. A War Birds Burlesque](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fFV2FA2RtcA/mqdefault.jpg)


![The Wind It Blew Up the Railroad Track
Day 237 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
Sandburg writes: This is for cold weather, around the stove in the switch shanty.
[from The Traditional Ballad Index] The history of this song is a bit vague, as it has both clean and dirty forms. Sandburg prints a single stanza of a clean text (saying of it This is for cold weather, around the stove in the switch shanty). But the bawdy version seems to be much more widespread.
Which is original? The evidence available to me does not make it clear. The possibility that Sandburgs text is bowdlerized cannot be denied. The Wind It Blew Up the Railroad Track](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fWWVTt9LUqc/mqdefault.jpg)

