My late cousin, Robert Lofgren, was a real hunting enthusiast. He took it so seriously he self-published a detailed, profusely illustrated memoir, titled The Old Moose Hunter, of his adventures. About the only hunting I've done was to once send a Mason jar to cannery heaven with a 12-gage shotgun. It's getting to be the time of year when I stay out of the woods. Even if I were wearing a red cap, I worry some hunter might mistake me for a trophy-sized Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. I think of the hunter in the Tom Lehrer song who brags:
I shot myself the maximum the game laws would allow:
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.
Instead, I'm going to stay indoors and sing about hunters. This version, from Appalachia (Byrd Moore & his Hot Shots), betrays the British source, in that it contrasts the world-views of three stereotyped hunters: the realistic Irishman, the negativistic Scotsman, and the imaginative Welshman. Evidently Dylan Thomas, holding forth in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village in the 1950s until his liver gave out, wasn't the only Welshman to interpret the world differently from the rest of us.
The origins of the song are obscure. According to the Ballad Index website, fragments of it appear in a couple of early 17th century English plays. Either one playwright stole from the other, or both borrowed a song that was already floating around. Whatever the source, it must have been fairly popular among the people who emigrated here, because versions have been collected all along the American Atlantic seaboard.
The first generation of country musicians to record in the 1920s, such as Fiddlin' John Carson, were not professional musicians, and weren't much into crowd entertainment techniques. Carson, in fact, never learned to fiddle in time with a band's strict guitar rhythm. The next generation of musicians cashed in on record sales, as well as improved cars and roads, by travelling around to small towns, entertaining the locals. A typical show would include a set featuring songs and ballads, followed by a square dance with all-instrumental numbers. Byrd Moore, Clarence Green, and Clarence Ashley, the Hot Shots, were representative of this second generation. Clarence Ashley (guitar and vocal), who also recorded a number of ballads with modal banjo, had cut his musical teeth entertaining for a medicine show. Three Men Went A-hunting was one of the Hot Shot's signature crowd pleasers. The band used the name of the town in which they were playing for the last verse. That joke wouldn't work on a recording, so they substituted Norton, Virgina, Moore's home town. This article resides in MBOTMA town, so I reverted to the original joke. A more typical collected version ends when the hunters find an owl, the Welshman declares it's the devil, and they all run away. The "outhouse" verse was composed by the New Lost City Ramblers when they covered the 1929 Byrd Moore & his Hot Shots record (New Lost City Ramblers, Vol. 3; Folkways FA2398, available from Smithsonian Folkways).
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Complete Lyrics:
Three men went a-hunting, and something they did find;
They came upon a porcupine, and that they left behind.
The Irishman said, "It's a porcupine," the Scotsman, he said, "Nay."
The Welshman said, "It's a pincushion with the pins stuck in the wrong
way."
Three men went a-hunting, and something they did find;
They came upon a toad-frog, and that they left behind.
The Irishman said, "It's a toad-frog," the Scotsman, he said, "Nay."
The Welshman said, "It's a jaybird with the feathers worn away."
Three men went a-hunting, and something they did find;
They came upon an outhouse, and that they left behind.
The Irishman said, "It's an outhouse," the Scotsman, he said, "Nay."
The Welshman said, "It's a church-house with the steeple blown away."
Three men went a-hunting, and something they did find;
They came upon MBOTMA, and that they left behind.
The Irishman said, "It's MBOTMA," the Scotsman, he said, "Nay."
The Welshman said, "It's the end of the world, let's go back the other
way."