On the twelfth of July from Lewisporte set sail,
Employed by the railway on the S.S. Springdale;
The Canadian National they called CNR,
And all of the boys they were drinkin' Blue Star.
A young lady passenger with us did set sail,
With a glass in her hand as she leaned o'er the rail,
She was neat, tall and handsome, and brighter by far,
And a smile on her face as she drank the Blue Star.
We were not long started when the captain came down,
And saw we were drinkin', on us cast a frown:
"You're breakin' the rules, boys, you know that ye are."
But his temper cooled off when he saw the Blue Star.
Now, some of the boys they went up to the mate,
They went up to his room for to give him a treat;
He said, "I am tired after travellin' so far."
But he hopped out o' bunk when he saw the Blue Star.
She tied up at Bonne Bay, and the boys went on shore,
To search for a beverage, they searched o'er and o'er;
They searched for a beverage, they searched near and far,
But all they could find was a case of Blue Star.
Now, some of the boys they were waltzing with joy,
And out on the highway the miles they will drive,
Drinkin' some liquor in some fancy bar;
I'd rather stay on board with a case of Blue Star.
Tonight on the train we are drinkin' strong rum,
We'll have a hangover when we get home;
We'll stop off at Whitbourne - it's not very far,
And we'll cure our hangover with a beak of Blue Star.
####.... Author unknown. Traditional Newfoundland song ....####
This variant recorded by Crooked Stovepipe (Newfoundland Bluegrass, trk#17, 1994, Third Wave Productions, Gander, NL).
A variant was also recorded by George Grandy [b.1937] in Grand Bank, NL (Drifter From The Coast, trk#6, 1974, Audat Records, Oshawa, Ontario, engineered by Ron Duclos and recorded at MUN Studio, St. John's, NL).
From the Newfoundland Labrador Liquor Corporation (NLC) magazine Occasions, Fall, 2008, Provincial Producer's Spotlight: Blue Star - This Newfoundland beer was a winner at the 1954 international beer-making competition in Munich, Germany. But its roots go back farther than that. The Bavarian Brewing Company was set up in St. John's in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression. In their day, Charles Fox Bennett and other early beer-makers used wooden puncheons for storage, a manual malting process and traditional cork stoppers. The new Bavarian brewery used the most modern German equipment, producing its first beer two years later. German brew master Han Schneider lived on the Leslie Street premises and concocted the beer recipes himself. Who doesn't associate Blue Star, the camping beer as it's sometimes called, with good friends and a good time right here at home, especially in the great outdoors? It's with pride that its makers marketed Blue Star as made for Newfoundlanders by Newfoundlanders. And everyone remembers the radio ads of the 1990s that celebrated Blue Star as the shining star of the granite planet.
The S.S. Springdale was built and acquired in 1948 for the Canadian National Railway. Along with the S.S. Baccalieu, S.S. Bar Haven, M.V. Bonavista, M.V. Burin, M.V. Nonia,
M.V. Clarenville, S.S. Northern Ranger, and the S.S. Kyle, it connected inaccessible outports via coastal steamship routes. The Springdale was retired in 1973 and sold for scrap.
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