The Drunkard's Doom
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-05-09

Day 54 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

Sandburg says, "Whiskey!" cried the land rent agitator in a famine year in Ireland. "Whiskey it is that makes ye shoot at the landlords and miss 'em!" 

When the Washingtonian Society flourished in the 1840's its basic argument was that George Washington drank liquor but knew when to stop. Later came the saying, "The difference between a barber shop and a saloon is that when a man has had one shave he quits." 

School children in midwest states in the 1880's carried physiology books with color charts showing the progress of a drunkard's stomach from the pink of health to the raging crimson of delirium tremens. The drink habit, as an insidious destroyer, was presented in church, school, and town opera house, in the play Ten Nights in a Bar Room. The mood of that melodrama is gathered in these six verses of The Drunkard's Doom. 

Mary O.Eddy heard it from old women who sang it as girls in Ohio when the Temperance Movement was using songs in its crusades. Henry L. Mencken, a chamber music pianist, a composer, a contrapuntalist, a critic of music and the arts in general, writes the harmonization here.