No. 11 John Adkins’ Farewell, Soc 200
Hexatonic, mode 3 b (I II III IV V VI —)
Poor drunkards, poor drunkards, take warning by me,
The fruits of transgression behold now I see;
My soul is tormented, my body confin’d;
My friends and my children left weeping behind.
Much intoxication my ruin has been,
And my dear companion I’ve barbarously slain;
In yonder cold graveyard her body doth lie,
And I am confined and must shortly die.
A solemn death warning to drunkards I leave,
While my poor body lies cold in the dark grave;
Remember John Adkins, his death and reform,
Lest justice o’ertakes you and sorrow comes on.
A whole life of sorrow can never atone,
For that cruel murder that my hands have done;
I am justly condemned, it’s right that I should die,
Therefore, let all drunkards take warning hereby.
Farewell, my dear children, wherever you be;
Though quite young and tender and dear unto me;
I leave you exposed in nature’s wide field,
In which God is able poor orphans to shield.
No mother to teach you, no mother to guide
Your tender affections from sin’s awful tide;
No portion to shun you from hunger or cold,
My poor little orphans are cast on the world.
When sorrows oppress you and sickness comes on,
You’ll cry for your mother, but, oh, she is gone;
Your father, in anger, struck her on the head,
She bled, groan’d, and languish’d, and now she is dead.
My heart swells with sorrow, my eyes overflow,
Soon, oh my dear children, I’ll bid you adieu;
Oh may my kind neighbors your guardians prove,
And heaven, kind heaven, protect you above.
My soul to His pleasure I humbly submit,
And with my last burthen fall down at His feet;
To plead for His mercy that flows from above,
That pardons poor drunkards, and crowns them above.
John G. McCurry, compiler of the Social Harp, claims this song and dates it 1851. The tune is identical with that of ‘When Boys Go A-Courting’, Sharp, ii., 206. The “drunkard” theme may have been the textual source of ‘Way Up On Clinch Mountain’, where, to the same tune, the singer glories in his excesses including that of whiskey drinking. See Sandburg, 307. Miss Scarbrough has a negro adoption of the same tune in ‘Noble Skewball’; see On the Trail of the Negro Folk-Song, 63. An English folk-song ‘Sweet England’ has a variant tune. See English Folk-Songs for Schools, 46. For an Irish variant see Petrie, No. 1172. A Scotch variant is ‘My Ain Fireside’, Lyric Gems of Scotland, 186, which in turn borrowed its tune from ‘Todlen Hame’.