"Grey dog" = "Greyhound bus"

[Dan Goncharoff]

I have been a fan for about a year.

I share your frustration with the lack of a playlist. I have been known to
sit with a song identifying app running on my smartphone while I listen,
hoping to get lucky on some obscure song from the 1900s-1950s I never heard
before.

DanG


On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 1:00 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>
wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      "Grey dog" = "Greyhound bus"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Not a very clever bit of slang, but not in HDAS nor Greene's Dictionary.
>
> (Background: I've pointed out here before a radio station emanating from
> Poughkeepsie that by policy plays chiefly American popular and folk music
> recorded before 1970 -- WHVW.  It's an exceeding low-watt station with very
> limited broadcast range, perhaps 25 or 30 miles from Poughkeepsie.  About
> half of the week  it carries music with no-one on mike, using a
> proto-Shuffle known to its intimates as Murray the Machine.  These sessions
> are pleasurable but frustrating, since often hear familiar songs I can't
> recall, and more often interesting songs I'd like to have identified.)
>
> Yesterday evening I heard a song whose title might be "Restless", sung by a
> man, in white-country style, which contained the words "grey dog" in a
> context that referred to travel by bus.  This morning I heard a song whose
> title might be "Cash on the Barrel", sung by a man, in white-country
> style.  This song chronicles the misadventures of a travelling man who has
> no money and in each stanza is told he needs to put cash on the barrel.  In
> one stanza he flags a bus to get out of town, but the driver tells him he
> needs to put. . . .  The bus is called both a Greyhound and a Grey Dog.
> This station has been introducing me to white-country music, I listening
> otherwise mostly to jazz and black-country music -- and classical.  So, a
> not very well informed guess dates both these records to the late 1940s or
> early-mid 1950s.
>
> I had urged you all to look for this station if you should ever be in its
> broadcast range.  Since then, it has become accessible through its website.
>
> http://www.whvw.net/
>
> You will be likely to hear Joe Turner, Gid Tanner, Jimmie Rodgers, Al
> Jolson, Cecil Gant, Marion Harris, Bert Williams, Louie Jordan, the Mound
> City Blue Blowers, Erskine Hawkins, Bob Wills, among others.  I'll be
> forever grateful for having been introduced to Gant and Harris.  Check it
> out.
>
> GAT
>
> --
> George A. Thompson
> The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998..
>
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