Foggy, Foggy Dew
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-03-26

Day 6 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

Carl Sandburg says, "This arrangement is from a song rather widely known...and Observers as diverse as Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Arthur T. Vance and D. W. Griffith say this song is a great condensed novel of real life. After hearing it sung with a guitar one evening in Chicago, D. W. Griffith telegraphed two days later from New York to Lloyd Lewis in Chicago, "Send verses Foggy Dew stop tune haunts me but am not sure of words stop please do this as I am haunted by the song." 

Various explanations of the phrase ‘the foggy dew’ have been put forward, the most detailed being that given by James Reeves in ‘The Idiom of the People‘, 1958, pp. 45-57. He concludes that ‘foggy dew’ signifies the girl’s impulse to seek the man’s comfort.