Songs of Pick and Shovel Men

Among those working in the Hungarian village, the pick and shovel men (cf. pp. 84–7) came closest to organized workers. That is to say, the building of railroads and the raising of dikes and other earthworks demanded strong organization, which also developed among them into a defence against the employer. Some of their songs are related to the soldiers’ and herdsmen’s songs, from which they came. Others tell about the hardships of work:

’Neath the sky we have our dwellin’,

For a quilt the stars of heaven.

All day we have slaved as navvies,

Where the thicket, there our bed is.

Creakily the barrow’s wheels are gratin’,

Full of murky mud it is all laden.

When my arms and feet are to buckle,

Then would I change with the dead nettle.

Zsadány (former Bihar County)

{508.} The constant coming and going habituated the pick and shovel man to the tavern and to the pub:

Why a navvy has no house nor shanty

Is because his wages go for brandy.

And the barman spends the navvy’s money

Playing cards and on a sloe-eyed honey.

Szentes (Csongrád County)

Among their songs, mixed in origin and new in style, the most frequent is the cocky, taunting, or perhaps bitter-toned drinking and revelling song. Songs that speak of wandering, of working places, and of taking leave are more individualistic and more suited to occasions:

No one’s life’s as bloody hard and heavy

As the girl’s whose lover is a navvy.

For a digger has to keep a-going,

And must leave his lass at home sorrowing.

Hódmezővásárhely (Csongrád County)

Songs of the pick and shovel men are primarily known in the southern part of the Great Plain. In other places, such songs were only occasionally sung, primarily at places where the pick and shovel men had worked for a longer time.