You can hear a version of it by The Wolfe Tones here. To work upon the railway, The railway Im weary of the railway Poor paddy works on the railway In eighteen hundred and forty-two From hartlepool i moved to crewe An i Found myself a job to do A working on the railway I was wearing corduroy breeches Digging ditches, pulling switches Dodging pitches, i was Working on the railway In eighteen hundred and forty-three I broke the shovel across me. In a vastly abridged form, I present “Paddy on the Railway”. So many Irish worked on the railway that, in the Eastern States in the 19th century, there was a popular saying: “an Irishman was buried under every tie.” This song is actually very long, with at least one original verse for each year between 18, and many in between. Freshmen, eager to get home for the Chinese New Year, queue up at the railway station for hoursDays later, they squeeze into a crowded train and dream of the home-cooked meals and love theyll enjoy once they arrive homeThis, they say, makes all the trouble of getting home worthwhile. 2 Ernest Bourne recorded the first version, released in 1941, by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1938 under the title 'A-working on the Railway'. 1 The earliest confirmed date of publication is from 1864 from a manuscript magazine. He painted a word picture of: An American railroad car, that long, narrow wooden box like a flat roofed Noah’s ark. In The American Songbag, the writer Carl Sandburg claims that the song has been published in sheet music since the early 1850s. Robert Louis Stevenson’s descriptive prose in his 1879 classic The Amateur Emigrant was no less picturesque. Fillen mi whori whori ay fillen mi whori whori ay to. Chorus: To work upon the railway, the railway, To work up-on the railway. A crisp, easy-to sing tune about an Irishman who comes to the US to work on the railroads. In eighteen hundred and fourty one I put my courdy oy breaches on (2 Times) To work upon the railway.
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