"I got a woman / Way ...

[George Thompson]

Michael Taft's concordance to Pre-War Blues Lyrics doesn't have this expression.  He has 10 or so lines with "talking all over town" or "running all over town" but not "over town" as a direction or area comparable to "back o' town".

http://www.dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/framconc.htm

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
Date: Thursday, June 3, 2010 2:45 am
Subject: "I got a woman / Way ...
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> _over town_"
>
> as Ray Charles sang.
>
> It's the case that _over town_, which I otherwise know only from Ray
> Charles's song, is common among local speakers here in the towns along
> the banks of the Susquehanna in the Wyoming Valley, with reference to
> going across the river uptown (north) to "The City Square" in
> Wilkes-Barre, the primary local shopping district. My wife, who never
> used this phrase in Boston, uses it all the time, now that she's back
> home.
>
> I *still* have no idea what, exactly, Ray Charles had in mind, when he
> used "(way) _over town_."
>
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> –Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org