The sing-along — “if you know it, sing it!” as we say around here — is fundamental to folk music. As folk music’s guiding spirit, the late Pete Seeger, once said, “I rather put songs on people’s lips than in their ears.”
Pete believed songs offered powerful magic to bring unity. “Get people to sing together,” he said, “and they’ll act together too.”
“Once upon a time,” he said, “wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece?”
We love how Seeger broke that idea down.
“Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.”
“I’ve often thought,” Pete said, “standing onstage with 1,000 people in front of me, that somebody over on my right had a great-great grandfather who was trying to kill the great-great grandfather of somebody off to my left. And here we are all singing together... Gives you hope.”
About This Song
For us nowadays, there’s no better sing-along than this tune, which the newest Floodster Jack Nuckols brought us about a year ago, a song that stars the beautiful Ohio, which rolls and flows beside our towns and through our hearts.
The song “Shawneetown” is a wonderful reflection on the early history of boating up and down the Ohio River. While it sounds like an old tune, it is largely a 1970s composition by folk artist Dillon Bustin.
As we reported here earlier, Bustin based the first verse and chorus on historical fragments published in 1828 and quoted in Leland D. Baldwin’s 1941 book, The Keelboat Age on Western Waters, including:
Some rows up, but we rows down, All the way to Shawneetown, Pull away — pull away!
Bustin, who combined these fragments, composed the tune and several additional verses for the song we have now.
Shawneetown is in southern Illinois where the Ohio meets the Wabash River. It was the first Anglo settlement on the Ohio, serving as a major trade center and a government administrative center for the Northwest Territory in the early 19th century. Keelboats were the most efficient commercial vessels of the time.
The song’s first studio recording was likely the 1978 rendering by American folk duo Malcolm Dalglish and Grey Larsen. It appeared on their First of Autumn album.
For more history of this good old tune, see this earlier Flood Watch article.
And Even More Song Histories
And speaking of song histories, we have back stories on more than 200 of the tunes we play.
Check out Flood Watch’s free Song Stories section and click on a title to see what we have on file about it. You can browse them alphabetically by song titles or chronologically by the years in which they were written. Click here to give it a look.
