Longest Name Song (E. Greenleaf & G. Mansfield) with lyrics

#03220

Longest Name Song (E. Greenleaf & G. Mansfield) with lyrics

My father and mother were excellent folks,
They spent half their time in practical jokes;
And when I was born they were both of one mind,
They said I should have all the names they could find;
So they considered as wise as could be,
And this is the handle they stuck onto me:

Jonathan, Joseph, Jeremiah,
Timothy, Titus, Obadiah,
William, Henry, Walter, Sim,
Reuben Rufus, Solomon, Jim,
Nathaniel, Daniel, Abraham,
Roderick, Frederick, Peter, Sam,
Hyman, Tyman, Nicholas, Tat,
Christopher, David, Jehosaphat.

I joined the societies there in the town,
My name on the rolls it was all written down;
The clerk in the meeting was calling the roll,
When he got through my name, there wasn't a soul;
For to wait for the ending, they were all so vext,
They said they'd go home and come back for the next.

When I came to get married, the case was as bad,
The parson stared at me, he thought I was mad;
"That your parents denied you a sensible name,"
Said he, "Young man, that's a very great shame;
But we'll say nothing more, for reasons of mine,
But you'll have to get married a bit at a time."

####.... William G. Eaton and Harry Hunter (See notes below) ....####

The lyrics to this minstrel song were collected in 1929 from the singing of Mr. Charles Earle of Change Island with a tune from Mrs. Fred Earle of Fogo, and published by Elisabeth Bristol Greenleaf and Grace Yarrow Mansfield as #170 on p.345 in Ballads And Sea Songs Of Newfoundland (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1933; Folklore Associates, Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1968).

Greenleaf and Mansfield noted that this is a variant of a once popular music-hall song, Jonathan, Joseph, Jeremiah.

From: Antiqbook - William G. Eaton and Harry Hunter [1841-1906]: Jonathan, Joseph, Jeremiah or Named After Everybody. London, Francis Bros & Day. 1877-81. With an unsigned colour lithograph portrait, of the singer/publisher/Minstrel James Francis of the Mohawk Minstrels. We can date this certainly between 1877 when Francis Bros & Day started and 1881 when Harry Hunter was persuaded to join them both in the Mohawks and in the publishing business. It is likely to be 1881 as the back cover confirms the arrival of Hunter into the partnership with a list of songs. William G. Eaton has 13 titles to his credit in Kilgarriff, many of them music hall songs.

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