| "The Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim" | |
|---|---|
| Song | |
| Written | c. 1880 |
| Genre | Western ballad |
| Composer(s) | Will S. Hays (adapted from "The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane") |
| Lyricist(s) | Oliver Edwin Murray |
"The Little Old Sod Shanty On The Claim" is an American folk song written by Oliver Edwin Murray (O.E. Murray) of South Dakota. It appeared somewhere around 1880 published in several American newspapers. [1] The printings suggested that it be sung to the tune of "The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane" written by Will Hays in 1871. The song tells of the trials of homesteading on the Great Plains and became immensely popular among the settlers. The title comes from variations of a refrain found in the verses and the chorus:
Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food, and may also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale. Pursued in different ways around the world—and in different historical eras—homesteading is generally differentiated from rural village or commune living by isolaion of the homestead. Use of the term in the United States dates back to the Homestead Act (1862) and before. In sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in nations formerly controlled by the British Empire, a homestead is the household compound for a single extended family. In the UK, the term 'smallholder' or 'crofts' is the rough equivalent of 'homesteader'.
The Great Plains is the broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland, that lies west of the Mississippi River tallgrass prairie in the United States and east of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. and Canada. It embraces:
- ... my little old sod shanty on my claim.
Jack Thorp published a version of the song in his 1908 book, Songs of the Cowboys, titled "Little Adobe Casa" which he attributed to a Tom Beasley written in 1887. [2]
"The Little Old Sod Shanty On The Claim" has been performed and recorded numerous times. Slim Wilson's December 1936 recording of the song is part of the Traditional Music and Spoken Word Catalog of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
Clyde Carol Wilson, better known as Slim Wilson, was an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, and radio and TV personality who was a cornerstone of country music in the Ozarks for more than 50 years beginning in the 1930s; both in his own right, and as a member of The Goodwill Family and The Tall Timber Trio. Wilson was a mainstay of ABC-TV’s Ozark Jubilee; and hosted ABC's Talent Varieties in 1955 and his own local television show in Springfield, Missouri from 1964–1975.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife". The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the Library in 1928 as a repository for American folk music. The center and its collections have grown to encompass all aspects of folklore and folklife worldwide.
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. The Library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. The Library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress has claims to be the largest library in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 450 languages."
