"Grey dog" = "Greyhound bus"

[George Thompson]

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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