Submitted by: agcomm,  Thu Dec  4 10:39:01 1997


Plains Folk:   "Sod Shanty" Gets Around
 
Tom Isern, Professor of History    
North Dakota State University  
COPYRIGHT 1997 Plains Folk
 
     I was sitting at a Welsh St. David's Day concert, enjoying
music mostly unfamiliar to me, when suddenly I thought, "Say, I 
know that tune."  It was "Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim," 
being sung as a hymn with Welsh words!
     This song is musical bindweed.  It keeps cropping up in new
places, and you can't kill it.  It's a Great Plains survivor.
     The Welsh choir was singing from a songbook, which says the
song is an "Old Melody," to be sung "With great reverence."  
Earliest versions of the song were indeed hymns, I think, the
English title of which was "Lily of the Valley":   
     He's the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and Morning Star,  
     He's the fairest of ten thousand to my soul.
     Next the tune appeared as a minstrel song, "Little Old Log
Cabin in the Lane," penned by one Will S. Hays in 1871. 
Obviously, that song was environmentally wrong for the plains. 
The question is, Who adapted the log cabin song to the plains by
converting it into a sod shanty?
     Roger Welsh, the Nebraska folklorist, says that whenever he
sings "Little Old Sod Shanty," someone is sure to come up to him
afterward to announce that his great granddad wrote it, and Roger
has one of the verses wrong.  Roger says he's keeping a list of
all the people who wrote this song of the plains.
     He can add to that list the name of Everett Calvin Motz, a
German from Pennsylvania who lived successively in three places
in western Kansas--Beloit, Sheridan County (being there at the
time of Dull Knife's raid), and Selden.  Motz's great
granddaughters told me indeed that he was the one who wrote
"Little Old Sod Shanty."  Their aunt Frances Motz Todd of Selden
has a  cabinet-card photograph of E.C. Motz standing next to his
sod house.  A version of "Little Old Sod Shanty" is printed on
the back.  If Motz did not write the song, he at least liked it
enough to print it up for distribution with his picture. 
     The genealogy of folksongs, though, is even trickier than
that of people.  There are variant versions and alternate authors
from all over the plains.  John Lomax found the song in Texas, 
Edith Fowke found it in Saskatchewan.  A version from New Mexico
converts the sod shanty into a "Little 'Dobe Casa on the Plain." 
The tear-jerking cowboy ballad, "Little Joe the Wrangler" (about
a young orphan wrangler killed in a stampede), as well as its
spinoff, "Little Joe the Wrangler's Sister Nell," both use the
same old tune. 
     This folksong family has another branch that connects
directly back to the "Little Old Log Cabin" song.  The main song
in this branch, "That Lonesome Hungry Hash House Where I Stay," 
is a staple of old-time southern string bands.  Oddly enough,
though, Tim Rodgers of Calgary sent me a song from this branch of
the family.  It's about a hotel in Alberta.  So even this 
southern song about crummy hotels eventually extends into the
Canadian plains.
     To top it off, there is a song in Australia called "The 
Freehold on the Plain" about a sheepman going broke.  Both the
tune and the situation depicted in the song show that it is 
connected somehow to "Sod Shanty" of the North American plains.
     This is getting too complicated.  Maybe this is one of those
songs you should just sing and not inquire too closely about:
     Oh, the hinges are of leather, the windows have no glass,  
     The roof it lets the howling blizzard in.
     And I hear the hungry coyote as he sneaks up through the     
      grass,   
     Round my little old sod shanty on the claim.
     Still, I always sort of wished I'd come across a version of
"Little Old Sod Shanty" rooted in my North Dakota home.  In 1997
I got my wish--as I'll explain in my next column.                 
                               ###
NDSU Agriculture Communication
Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866