Portland Folk Song

Where the jolly sons of Neptune meet the riders of the sage,

They will find there is a game not to their own advantage,

The sailor’s boardinghouses run the police court and the mayor,

Nothing here they do or try will ever come out fair.

Here came the cowpokes from the sweet hills of the Paloose,

Rolled in on some Cayuse ponies just in time to let ‘er loose,

In some perfumed bagnio they’d fall asleep dead drunk,

To wake up on the rolling main without a seaman’s trunk.

Larry Sullivan from Scranton, a bloated Irish pig,

Says he was a prizefighter, he never made it big,

In Astoria he shipped sailors like salmon by the can,

He set up shop in Portland as a big Republican.

Then came Bunko Kelly horsefeathers for a brain,

Claimed he sent 3,000 men to sail the rolling main,

When he planned to break up the Sullivan monopoly,

He was sent up for 13 years in the penitentiary.

The last of the shanghaiers, Mysterious Billy Smith,

Diamond belt welter weight, loved his young bride to death,

When she died it made him mean, dirtiest fighter in the world,

Down in the docklands of Albina he gave shanghaiing a whirl.

Where the jolly sons of Neptune meet the riders of the sage,

They will find there is a game not to their own advantage,

The sailor’s boardinghouses run the police court and the mayor,

Nothing here they do or try will ever come out fair.