Remembering The Old Songs:

HAVE A FEAST HERE TONIGHT (RABBIT IN THE LOG)

by Lyle Lofgren
(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, November, 2011)

One summer's day when I was about 6 years old, and everyone else in the family was distracted, I got bored and wandered out of our farmyard into a neighbor's woods. Near the railroad tracks for Northern Pacific's St. Paul--Duluth line, I spotted a stone-lined hole in the ground. It was perhaps 10 feet square, and mostly filled with rotten timbers. I waited a day after my parents got through scolding me for going into the woods by myself, and then asked about the hole. They said that a widow had lived there all alone in a small shack. Sometime in the 1910s, a tramp came down the tracks and offered to cut wood for her in exchange for a meal. He cut wood so well that he stayed there for the rest of his life. After they both died, the shack slowly fell into itself.

This song was popularized by Bill and Charlie Monroe in a 1938 record, but they learned it from a recording by a group called the Prairie Ramblers (1933 with fiddle lead; re-recorded 1935 with harmonica lead and a nice jug accompaniment). The Prairie Ramblers, Kentuckians, sang on the WLS (Chicago) National Barn Dance. I don't know where the Ramblers got the song. There's a one-verse fragment, identified as of African-American origin and collected in 1913, In Brown's North Carolina Folklore, Vol. III, #166, as Rabbit in the Log.

Both Ramblers recordings, as well as the souped-up Monroe version, are available on YouTube. All three are close to identical, but I'm offering the Prairie Ramblers rendition because of one crucial difference. In verse 3, the Monroes sing "farmer's shed" instead of "a barn or a shed." The difference is between the attitude of someone who thinks he knows the future versus someone who doesn't but is confident that whatever turns up, it'll be something good.

So I thought of the tramp who lucked out when I first heard this song. I imagined that, in order to continue walking down an endless railroad track, he'd have to have the sort of optimism displayed by the singer.

The parenthesized words are sung by the rest of the band, while the parenthesized words with quotation marks are spoken by one member. The delivery is somewhat more syncopated than I've been able to notate. As usual, it's better to listen to the originals.

[CLICK HERE FOR SHEET MUSIC (pdf file)]

Complete Lyrics:
1. There's a rabbit in the log, and I ain't got my dog;
How will I get him? I know. ("how?")
I'll take me a br'ar and I'll twist it in his hair,
That's the way I'll get him, I know.
I know (yes, I know), I know (I surely know),
That's the way I'll get him, I know.
I'll take me a br'ar and I'll twist it in his hair ("Ow!"),
That's the way I'll get him, I know.

2. I'll build me a fire and I'll cook that old hare,
I'll roll him in the flame and make him brown ("good and brown").
Have a feast here tonight, while the moon is shining bright,
Then find myself a place to lie down.
To lie down (to lie down), to lie down (oh, to lie down),
Just find myself a place to lie down.
Have a feast here tonight, while the moon is shining bright,
Then find myself a place to lie down.

3. I'm going down that track with my coat ripped up my back.
The soles on my shoes are nearly gone.
Just a little ways ahead there's a barn or a shed.
That's where I'll rest my weary bones.
Weary bones (my weary bones), oh, weary bones (those lazy bones),
That's where I'll rest my weary bones.
Just a little ways ahead there's a barn or a shed.
That's where I'll rest my weary bones.


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