"Skookum Ryan the Walking Boss" by Joe Hill?

[Dave Robertson]

>From an obscure website about the folk music of anarchist labor unionists in the USA, circa 1900...this song is attributed tentatively to Joe Hill.  --  Dave
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SKOOKUM RYAN THE WALKING BOSS (FRAGMENT) (JOE HILL) (c. 1912)



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Louis Moreau, a Wobbly "camp delegate" who helped organize the construction workers [of the Canadian Northern Railroad Company in British Columbia, 1912]... remembers that Joe Hill... appeared in the strikers' camp in Yale, British Columbia.... Moreau remembers seeing Joe Hill often in the office of the Yale strike secretary writing songs. "Where The River Fraser Flows" was written during the first few days Hill was in the camp....
Another song, "Skookum Ryan, the Walking Boss," was very popular and consisted of five or six stanzas of which Moreau remembers one....

Gibbs M. Smith, Labor Martyr Joe Hill, New York, NY, 1969, pp. 24-25.


Lyrics (one stanza) as remembered by Moreau, reprinted ibid.


Skookum Ryan the Walking Boss
Came tearing down the line,
Says he, "You dirty loafers take your coats off
Or go and get your time."


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You can email me at
manfredh at mainz.netsurf.de
--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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