Oh Sacramento’s a fine old man
Doo-dah doo-dah
Sacramento’s a fine old man
Doo-dah doo-dah day.

Chorus
Blow boys blow for Californio
There’s lots of gold so I’ve been told
On the banks of Sacramento.

Sacramento’s dead and gone
Doo-dah doo-dah
Sacramento’s dead and gone
Doo-dah doo-dah day.

Chorus

So off we’ll go with a big sky-hoot
Doo-dah doo-dah
Our old man’s sure a tough galoot
Doo-dah doo-dah day.

Chorus

… for gold on the west coast here really started in California, in the days of ‘forty-nine, and there weren’t many people on the Pacific coast at that time: they were on the east coast. And there weren’t any railways or any roads across the continent, hostile Indians and desolate country, so they came around on sailing ships, usually from the east coast around Boston or New York or somewhere there, around Cape Horn and up to California. Now that was where our very wonderful man, Donald McKay, he was born in Shelburne, Nova Scotia and went down to Boston and there built some of the most fantastic sailing vessels the world has ever known. The Champion of the Seas logged twenty knots consecutively for twenty-four hours, something that even those modern ships that come into Vancouver today with their

eighteen thousand diesel horse-power can’t do, and the Champion of the Seas would be only about 250 feet overall in length. They were really fantastic records: and when the gold was discovered in California, they composed a song for the California days, in fact a couple of them. And, you see, they had to pick their anchors up by hand, they didn’t have any power at all, and one man, as a rule, a Negro on American ships, because they are very musical and like to sing while they work, he would climb up on the capstan head, which was like a big dumbbell on end, and they put big long bars like the spokes of a wheel without a rim, and the men would all get around this great big wheel with the shantyman on top and they’d work sometimes six and eight hours getting a capstan (he means anchor – PT) up; it was a slow job. And so the shantyman, he would usually start the song going, sing a line, and then the crew would join in with a second line, and then the shantyman would sing, and then the crew would sing in a sort of raggedy fashion because they were working hard. Now, I always liked this one;

this song I got from Captain George Robarts, a Nova Scotian captain of the very finest grade, and he was born in Avondale, Nova Scotia, near Windsor, and this is the way this one went:

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