I first learned this when I was immersing myself in the guitar style of Joseph Spence, preparatory to making an instructional video on his playing — but at the time I had no idea it was more than a charming little ditty with a bunch of sections and variations. On the album I had, it was titled “Don’t Let Nobody Burn Down Burma Road,” which is testimony to the fact that the producers couldn’t understand Spence’s Bahamian accent and didn’t have the internet handy to fill them in on the song’s history… which turns out to be interesting and to give the lyric a deeper meaning than they or I understood.
The first section is a verse that was already described as an “old song” when a Virginia newspaper printed it in 1868:
A bull-frog dressed in soldier’s clothes,
Went out one day to shoot some crows,
The crows smelt powder, and all flew away,
And the bull-frog had no sport that day.1
The paper printed that verse as a satiric commentary on a senator who had offered the assistance of the state militia to help oust President Andrew Johnson, and it resurfaced from time to time over the following decades in similarly mocking contexts, especially when white soldiers or militias were sent against Black communities — the uniformed frogs firing ineffectually on the black crows… which brings us to the Bahamas.
The first recording of this lyric in the islands seems to be from 1935, when Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle recorded it on Cat Island from a man named Wilberforce Swain, and it was recorded in the 1950s as a popular record by Delbon Johnson — but Spence’s version is specifically connected to a major event in Bahamian history, the Burma Road riots.
The short version of that story is that in the summer of 1942, as the United States entered WWII, two major air bases were under construction in the Bahamas by a mix of imported workers from the US and local hands, and it turned out that the Bahamian workers were being paid only a third (or a half, or a quarter — the reports vary) of the hourly wage paid to the Americans.
The Bahamians protested, their protests were ignored, they finally marched to the government offices in Nassau, and on gaining no compromise, they rioted. At least two protestors were killed, many more were wounded, and over a hundred were arrested, some serving almost ten years in prison. The immediate result was a slight increase in pay and meals supplied by the employers. The longer-term result was the formation of the People’s Labour Party, and the riots are often cited as beginning the movement that led to Bahamian independence.
This brings us to Ronnie Butler, “the Godfather of Bahamian Music,” who recorded a song called “Burma Road” commemorating the riots, which included the old bullfrog and crows verse as one of its various sections. Another section went “Do wa Nanny, how you do?” I have no idea how that related to the theme, nor is it clear when Butler made the record — some sources say 1964, though the version I find online sounds somewhat later — or whether he or other singers were performing versions of the same medley years earlier, maybe even back to the immediate aftermath of the riots.
It’s also possible that Butler got the song from Spence: I assumed Spence was copying his record, since in the “Burma Road” section he sings “Don’t lick nobody” and his back-up singers respond “Burma Road,” as a sort of refrain, and Spence retained that pairing, though the phrases don’t follow logically in one voice — but when I talked about this in an interview for a Bahamian documentary on Spence, the interviewer said Butler was a big fan of Spence’s music and might have adapted his longer version from Spence’s, which, again, could easily be a survival of something sung back in the 1940s.
In any case, it’s a fun song to play, and a good story.
(As for Spence and his guitar style, I have already posted lots of pieces by and about him, including a Spence guitar medley, “Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer,” “Happy Meeting in Glory,” “Brownskin Girl,” “Glory of Love,” and “Sloop John B.”)