100-Year-Old Songs You Might Know Quiz

Answer: 5 miles

"The Camptown ladies sing this song,
Doo-da, Doo-da,
The Camptown racetrack's five miles long,
Oh, de doo-da day."

Stephen Foster published this song about a racetrack for horses in 1850, over 150 years ago. The village of Camptown, Pennsylvania claims to be the home of the actual track.

Answer: Louisiana

"Fare thee well my fairy fay
For I'm going to Louisiana
For to see my Susyanna"

I suspect his girlfriend's name was Susanna, but you do what you have to do, to make a rhyme fit! The song is at least as old as 1880 when the words appeared in a Harvard student songbook, but Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels advertised they were going to perform it in 1843.

Answer: derry-o

This song was first written down in Germany in 1826 and was probably brought to the US by German immigrants. There are many variations in different languages. Until I saw it written, I thought the word was "dairy oh!" because a dairy would be logical on a farm, but it's consistently spelled "derry-o," whatever that means.

Answer: boys

George F. Root wrote "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Prisoner's Hope)" in 1864 to cheer up Union soldiers who were prisoners of war during the US Civil War, though it would cheer up Confederate prisoners just as well. The boys were actually young men, mostly 18 and older, soldiers in the army.

Answer: snow

This nursery rhyme set to music began as a poem by Sarah Josepha Hale in 1830. She is the woman who much later convinced President Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday. She supposedly based the poem on a real girl named Mary who had a real pet lamb.

Answer: cheer, shout

"The men will cheer and the boys will shout
The ladies they will all turn out"

Ladies during the Civil War wouldn't do anything so unladylike as cheer or shout, but would probably politely wave their handkerchiefs as they gathered to see their family members and loved ones come home.

Bandleader Patrick Gilmore wrote the words in 1863, but the tune probably comes from an old drinking song, "Johnny Fill Up the Bowl." The song "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" was published about the same time and also uses the same tune.

Answer: handy

The song Yankee Doodle goes back at least to the Revolutionary War over 200 years ago, where ragged colonial soldiers were fighting against well-equipped British troops, but there are many variations from many time periods before and after. "Handy" is an unusual word today for the treatment of girls in "Mind the music and the step, And with the girls be handy," but I expect it meant something like skillful or tactful.

Answer: eat them

Goober peas are peanuts. "Goodness, how delicious, eating goober peas," the song says. The song is about Confederate soldiers cracking peanuts, scaring the general into thinking it was enemy rifle shots. Though the song sounds like it ought to have been sung during the Civil War itself, it was first published in 1866, a year after the war ended.

It may have been sung earlier, or it may have appeared in a stage show about the war that year.

Answer: three

"Three little children,
Lyin' in bed
Two were sick
And the other 'most dead."

But their mother's favorite bread revived them! The song was a poem by James Whitcomb Riley, published in 1900. In 1915, a collector of folk songs, E. C. Perrow, already found someone singing it as a folk song.

Answer: Alabama

The chorus of the original version, though there were many variations, is:

"Oh! Susanna, do not cry for me;
I come from Alabama, with my banjo on my knee."

Stephen Foster wrote this nonsense song in 1848. Gold was discovered in California later that year, and those heading west adopted the song as their unofficial anthem, making it the bestselling sheet music of its day. I like to count all the impossibilities: so hot I froze to death. That's one!