Days of '49 (1928)

Written by Charles Bensell aka Charles Rhoades
 O: Jules Allen                     1929 on Bluebird

Read "The Originals" about this song

From Taditonal Ballad Index

Days of Forty-Nine, The

DESCRIPTION: The singer, "Old Tom Moore from the Bummer's Shore," a relic of the California gold rush of 1849, recalls the various characters that he encountered "in the days of old when we dug up the gold"

AUTHOR: Charles Bensell ("Charley Rhoades") ?

EARLIEST DATE: 1874 (The Great Emerson's New Popular Songster)

KEYWORDS: gold mining drink death moniker

HISTORICAL REFERENCES: 1849 - Beginning of the California gold rush

From Kloosterman.be

Well, “The days of 49″one does sound like a classic Dylan song … even though it’s a cover. Dylan, utilizing his good old wheezy-vocals, gives it a great song that sounds confident and bold. Also, it is entertaining! (You can’t forget about that!) Good melody, performing, and everything. This is a strong case against people who think Bob Dylan was washed-up at this point of his career.
According to Professor William L. Alderson of Reed College [ Days of '49, Reprise," Northwest Folklore I (1965): 5—101, the first appearance of this song in print was in The Great New Popular Songster (San Francisco, 1872) where it was described as "sung with great success by [Billy] Emerson’s Minstrels at the Alhambra Theatre in San Francisco.” Professor Alderson says, “In the Lomax edited anthology Folk Song U.S.A., that work employs a tune collected by Frank Warner from Yankee John Galusha, but of that text only a ‘portion,’ determinably rather small, came from that source” [Galusha].
Alderson (who happens to be wrong in his assumption, since Yankee John sang us five verses and the chorus)* was arguing against the song’s being a folk song since he had found it only in fragmentary texts, or in printed texts similar to that printed in the book noted above. Yankee John’s version, however, like all his songs, he had learned through oral transmission.
Of course he could have learned it from someone who had a printed source. Professor Alderson says the original song probably was written by banjo artist Charles Bensell (stage name: Charley Rhoades) who died in June 1877. It is “certainly a minstrel song par excellence.” It was published in many songsters of the seventies and eighties, including, we are sure, “Old Put’s Golden Songster” in its later editions. “The Days of Forty-Nine” was one of many songs that came out of the Gold Rush days when on Long Island, for instance, not a boat was left that was capable of sailing to Panama or around the Horn. Though it began as a stage song, we think it was kept alive by communities that saw their sons strike out for the West to seek their fortunes, and then saw them come home, often, broke and broken.
Old Tom Moore is an example of the returning forty-niner, the disillusioned seeker of that elusive pot of gold. That we found this version of the song in upper New York State shows that the composer told a tale that was real to his hearers. Folk Songs of the Catskills (Cazden II) has a similar and longer version of the song given to the editors by George Edwards. Cazden’s notes further explore the song’s history and transmission.

Some Recordings

"Yankee" John Galusha, 1941

Frank Warner, 1946

Logan English, 1957

Milt Okun, 1963

Sandy and Jeanie Darlington, 1966

Bob Dylan, 1970

Steve Young, 1972

Spider John Koerner, 1974

Jim Kweskin, 1977

Ed McCurdy, 1996

Dave Swarbrick, 2003

David John & The Comstock Cowboys, 2007

Jim Cope, 2008

Here are four recordings

 



You can get them if you really want