Turkey in the Straw A
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-05-01

Day 46 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

I finally found out what it means to  "roll 'em up and twist 'em in a high tuckahaw:"  Describes six sets of leather harness for the six horses, gathered together and rolled up for the cart driver to control the horses.

Sandburg writes: This is the classical American rural tune. It has been sung at horses and mules from a million wagons. It has a thousand verses, if all were gathered. In the solitude of tall timbers it has been the of ompanion berry pickers in summer and squirrel hunters in fall time. On mornings when frost was on the pumpkin and the fodder  the pumpkin in the shock, when nuts were ripe and winter apples ready for picking, it echoed amid the horizons the of Muskingum river of Ohio and the Ozark foothills of Missouri.

Arguments have been presented that the turkey, the Thanksgiving bird, is more the Yankee national emblem than the eagle. Maybe so. Anyhow the turkey has a song of the people and the eagle hasn't. And as a song it smells of hay mows up over barn dance floors, steps around like an apple-faced farmhand, has the whiff of a river breeze when the catfish are biting, and rolls along like a good wagon slicked up with new axlegrease on all four wheels. It is as American as Andrew Jackson, Johnny Appleseed, and Corn-on-the-Cob."