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+--- Thread: Ole Dan Tucker (/showthread.php?tid=3053)
Ole Dan Tucker - Michigan Swamp Buck - 09-14-2025
For all those Johnny Rebs out there . . .
Get out the way! Ole Dan Tucker! You're too late for your supper!
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - SomeJackleg - 09-15-2025
(09-14-2025, 03:19 PM)Michigan Swamp Buck Wrote: For all those Johnny Rebs out there . . .
Get out the way! Ole Dan Tucker! You're too late for your supper!
every time i hear that name i think of these two shows,
first everybody's favorite sheriff jammin with the darlings.
and victor french, was always singing this on little house,
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Michigan Swamp Buck - 09-15-2025
I believe the one I found is a far earlier version and more accurate concerning the lyrics. I heard the popular version on an old western, and may have heard it as a kid's song in grade school. Much the same as the ones you posted.
I come to town the other night,
I hear the noise and saw the fight,
The watchman was a running round,
Cryin' Old Dan Tucker's come to town.
Chorus.
So get out the way! Get out the way!
Get out the way! Old Dan Tucker.
You're too late to come to supper.
ETA: As a Minstrel Show favorite from the early 1840s, it has a lot of different lyrics, some of which were very dirty. Wikipedia mentions some of those naughty lyrics . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Dan_Tucker
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Michigan Swamp Buck - 09-15-2025
Here are a few interesting things about this song.
Quote:Published in 1843 by Dan Emmett (the author of “Dixie”), who also claimed authorship, “Old Dan Tucker” may have evolved from a popular slave's song about a part-time minister who lived near Elberton, Georgia. The song was popular around both Northern and Southern campfires.
https://www.civilwarheritagetrails.org/civil-war-music/old-dan-tucker.html
Interestingly enough, I just found that Old Dan Tucker from Georgia is an ancestor of mine. His great-great-great-great -grandfather(?) was Capt. William Daniel Tucker, who helped found Jamestown, and is directly related to my Mother's family.
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Michigan Swamp Buck - 09-16-2025
The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, did a version of this song, which was played live in Ireland (video below). They love this tune in Ireland, and some Irish bands have their versions as well.
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Ninurta - 09-16-2025
I don't believe I've ever heard the song all the way through before. I've only heard snippets on old TV shows, never here out in the wild. It's not a song that ever caught on here. We have Bluegrass locally (my Dear Old Dad was an acquaintance of Ralph Stanly from over in Dickenson County, and I grew up in the shadow of Clinch Mountain, as in "Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys"), which developed, I believe, from old Irish and Scottish ballads, but songs like "Old Dan Tucker" were more Minstrel songs, usually heard out in the flatlands rather than up here in the hills and hollers.
From my youth, I recall songs like "froggy went a-courtin' ", "Groundhog", "The Preacher and the Bear", "Barbary Allen", "Sam Johnson", etc. Never heard "Old Dan Tucker" until I was a teenager so far as I can recall, and even then it was a "furriner" song from the Flatlanders.
.
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Michigan Swamp Buck - 09-16-2025
@"Ninurta"#2 Thanks for the reply.
I hadn't considered the difference between the hill music and the flatland music. Mom's side of the family began in Virginia and spread out west and south, though the hills and deeper down south.
Like you, I can't remember where or when I heard this tune, and the chorus is the part that stuck the most for me. It became a PC kid's song and was sung in grade school when I was young, so maybe that's where I first heard it. However, the history of this one is pretty well known if you look at the earliest lyrics, and my relatives were slave holders all over the South.
I connected Old Dan Tucker in Georgia to my family tree, that part is certain, and that part of the family owned slaves and were in the Civil War, but try to find that history, and it is like it has been erased. I find it somewhat strange that I had this tune rolling around my head and remembered my distant relative Capt William Tucker. Once I started down that road, I found a bit more of my family history in an old blackface minstrel song. Lots of folk music is like that, consider the murder ballad I was working on awhile back. I firmly believe that the origin of that song was a true story about someone's family.
I have relatives, North and South, worthy of the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, and can find the records of northern ones during the Civil War, but not my southern relatives. It seems that history has been suppressed, or erased from the books, with most of the South's records destroyed in the war apparently. So I have to find my family history in an old slave song from the early 1800s that became a minstrel show hit in 1843. Popular in the north and south and even in Europe now, I thought you'd have known something about this one.
ETA: I'm going to figure it out on my six string and create a version closer to the original. I like that version I posted at the beginning of this thread, its a very old timey sounding tune.
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Chiefsmom - 09-16-2025
Wow.
We actually sang that song in middle school choir.
We also sang the billboard song. Loved that one.
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Michigan Swamp Buck - 09-16-2025
(09-16-2025, 08:13 PM)Chiefsmom Wrote: Wow.
We actually sang that song in middle school choir.
We also sang the billboard song. Loved that one.
I never heard the Billboard Song before. I just now found the lyrics, and that one is a good laugh and a comment on corporate advertising. Thanks, good stuff to remember.
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Ninurta - 09-17-2025
(09-16-2025, 12:30 PM)Michigan Swamp Buck Wrote: @"Ninurta"#2 Thanks for the reply.
I hadn't considered the difference between the hill music and the flatland music. Mom's side of the family began in Virginia and spread out west and south, though the hills and deeper down south.
Like you, I can't remember where or when I heard this tune, and the chorus is the part that stuck the most for me. It became a PC kid's song and was sung in grade school when I was young, so maybe that's where I first heard it. However, the history of this one is pretty well known if you look at the earliest lyrics, and my relatives were slave holders all over the South.
I connected Old Dan Tucker in Georgia to my family tree, that part is certain, and that part of the family owned slaves and were in the Civil War, but try to find that history, and it is like it has been erased. I find it somewhat strange that I had this tune rolling around my head and remembered my distant relative Capt William Tucker. Once I started down that road, I found a bit more of my family history in an old blackface minstrel song. Lots of folk music is like that, consider the murder ballad I was working on awhile back. I firmly believe that the origin of that song was a true story about someone's family.
I have relatives, North and South, worthy of the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, and can find the records of northern ones during the Civil War, but not my southern relatives. It seems that history has been suppressed, or erased from the books, with most of the South's records destroyed in the war apparently. So I have to find my family history in an old slave song from the early 1800s that became a minstrel show hit in 1843. Popular in the north and south and even in Europe now, I thought you'd have known something about this one.
ETA: I'm going to figure it out on my six string and create a version closer to the original. I like that version I posted at the beginning of this thread, its a very old timey sounding tune.
Slavery was the difference between mountaineers and flatlanders. Flatlanders held slaves, but most mountaineers were too dirt poor to afford them, so slaves were few around here. There were a few, but not many. Minstrel shows developed from slavery, which wasn't really big around here.
I had several ancestors in the Civil War. One Yankee from PA that was in the 18th PA Infantry, and the rest were graybacks, mostly cavalrymen. The house I sit in was built by my grandpa, who was the grandson of a 4th corporal in the 22nd VA Cavalry, Co, D. Another ancestor from this area was a sergeant in the 16th VA Cavalry. Another was in the 19 KY Cavalry (Diamond's). "Diamond's" has to be specified there, because there were two different 10th KY Cavalry units - Diamond's was CSA, and the other was a US unit, the 10 US KY Cavalry.
One of my great-great grandpas lies buried in a cemetery about 1100 yards from where I sit. He was in the 37th VA infantry, CSA.
Another, from WV, was in the 19th VA Cavalry, but he started out as a member of the "Moccasin Rangers". The Moccasin Rangers were a band of guerillas and brigands, pretty much just outlaws. They got folded into the 19th VA Cavalry in an effort to legitimize them as regular soldiers for Law of War purposes, and when they got folded into the 19th, he got carried along with them. They became companies A and H, as I recall.
The 19th and 22nd fought along side one another in the Valley Campaigns in the summer and fall of 1864, so they may have actually ran across one another almost 100 years before my ma and pa met and merged the families together, unaware of the history.
Quite a few Confederate records are still maintained at the national Archives on microfilm, having been compiled early in the 20th century from surviving Confederate records. I found the CSR's ("Combined Service Records") of my great great grandpa in the 22nd VA, my great great grandpa in the 16th VA, and my great great grandpa in the 10th KY there, and have copies of them off of the microfilms. You might try looking at Fold3 on the internet if you are having trouble finding the records on your Confederate ancestors who served in the Civil War.
Another good source of information on them is pension applications of former Confederate soldiers. Those, however, were handled by the states rather than the Federals, as the federals weren't about to grant pensions to "rebels". Some states kept better records than others. As an example, it was from his pension application that I found out that my grand dad in the 22nd VA was home on a furlough when the south collapsed, which is why he got to skate as an "unreconstructed rebel" - he never surrendered, never got "paroled", nor did he ever sign one of those "oaths of loyalty" the Yankees were so fond of forcing former Confederates to sign.
The 22nd itself never surrendered, either. When the collapse came, they un-assed the AO and headed west after skirting Union lines, and disbanded near Blacksburg, VA, and everyone scattered for home from there... and took all their horses and equipment with them. They just vanished back into the woods from whence they came, and melted back into the civilian population as farmers - but "farmers" that you wouldn't want to piss off too hard.
There were just 4 members of the 22nd at Appomattox when Lee signed the surrender. The rest had faded back in to the general population.
Altogether, I've uncovered about 7 or 8 Confederates in my family tree, and one Yankee. I've not found any of them who were slave holders at the time of the Civil War, but have found one who "owned" an Indian woman as a slave or "servant" back in the 1600's, and another who stole an indentured servant (polite word for white slaves) from the Custis family that George Washington later married into. That gal was"stolen" also back in the 1600's - she was an Irish gal who was sold into indenture by her ma to the Custis family. I reckon my boy took a shine to he when he was petty much fresh off the boat from England, "stole" her,and ran off with her and married her. they raised a great pile of young-'uns after all the legal hassles over the theft of a slave were settled. He ended up being "cautioned" - whatever that meant - by the courts over the matter. He became the official interpreter to the Nanticoke Indians for the colony of Maryland eventually, after learning the language as a trader among the Nanticokes.
So, anyhow, in the matter of my Confederate ancestors, if they owned no slaves, then why did they fight? I mean, they really had no skin in the game according Yankee History, which claims the Confederates were fighting over slavery. If those gents had no slaves, then why fight? According to family traditions, they were fighting because their country was being invaded by furriners - Yankees. They weren't "rebelling", because they were not trying to over throw their own government - the Confederacy - nor were they fighting against their own government.They were fighting FOR it, against foreign invaders from another country - Yankees from the the U.S., which, since the Confederacy had separated from it and struck off on it's own, was at the time a foreign nation which the US invaded with intent to annex it back into the US.
They weren't even trying to overthrow the Union government. They just wanted to be left alone by invading Union troops. If the Yankees had just pulled up stakes and gone back home, there wouldn't have even been a war. The only one I know of who ever even set foot on Northern soil was th one in the 22nd VA Cav, who was briefly in the North when he burned Chambersburg and then moved on to the assault on Fort Stevens in Washington, DC. They were defending the South, and so mostly stayed where defense was possible, IN the South.
None of them considered themselves "rebels", because they were not rebelling against anything. They fought to maintain their own nation, just as the Patriots had done in the Revolution when the US separated from England. I've also got several Revolutionary ancestors who fought in that war, mostly as militiamen and "spies - that's what they called scouts in those days - , but a couple as Continentals.
History is written by the victors, and whether a person was a "rebel" or not often deepens on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line the eyes of the beholder sit on... or which side of the Atlantic in the matter of the Revolution.
I take a lot of shit from some folks over my views on the Civil war - a few Yankees, but mostly Liberals who have to make everything about race - but I don't care.It ain't MY fault their educations are lacking. They ought to see to that themselves - not my job to teach 'em.
.
RE: Ole Dan Tucker - Michigan Swamp Buck - 09-17-2025
@"Ninurta"#2
Wow, that's quite the family history, I must say. I'm going to go deeper with my research, so thanks for the references.
Concerning your viewpoints on the war, I find it refreshing, and I hear the ring of truth in my ears.
I find myself singing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" quite frequently, as "Dixie" is so overdone, although I do whistle it on occasion.
Now, with what I know about Ol' Dan Tucker, "I ben signing dat when I does my chores so dat da Misses knows I bes happy."