[Gregory Dowling]

Jerome, it is in the Penguin Book of Light Verse, edited by Gavin Ewart, and attributed to a certain Samuel C. Bushnell.

[Jerome Betts]

True, Gregory, but a different version that reverses the Lowells and Cabots.

I come from the city of Boston
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where Cabots speak only to Lowells
And Lowells speak only to God.

However, according to a letter of his, the Reverend Samuel Clarke Bucknell used the following at a dinner in 1915, saying that he had recently heard them in Boston.


I come from good old Boston
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Cabots speak only to the Lowells
And the Lowells speak only to God.

He adds: "My present concern is that Dr Bossidy should have the credit of the authorship of the lines which many have wrongly attributed to me."

Presumably Gavin Ewart was unaware of this letter, and also edited the version attributed to Bucknell.


http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i...view=1up;seq=3

[Chris O'Carroll]

Since I was born in Cambridge and grew up in various Boston suburbs, it's not surprising that I've known those lines (or some approximate version of them) for nearly as long as I've known about the Swan Boats, Paul Revere's ride, the political escapades of James Michael Curley, and other local lore.

[Gregory Dowling]

This takes us into wholly new areas of scholarship and attribution, Jerome! Thanks for the link.

[Michael Juster]

I wouldn't worry too much for now about attribution and alternative versions. It will all be made clear in the next issue of Light.

If the suspense is too much for you, for a one thousand dollar donation to Light, I'll send you an advance copy.

[Max Goodman]

Adding to Jerome's interesting tidbits: Ewart's text and attribution (Samuel Bushnell) also appear in William Harmon's and John Gross's Oxford anthologies and in Russell Baker's for Norton. (Of the light verse anthologies on my shelves for which American verse qualifies, Michael Roberts's book for Faber, nearly four decades earlier than the others, is the only one that omits the poem, which the others title "Boston.")

Harmon's book came out a year before Ewart's.

If any of the four anthologies acknowledges a source or copyright holder, it isn't alphabetized under the name of the man they credit with writing the poem.

[Martin Rocek]

It sounds familiar, though I can't quite place it.

Martin (I haven't read any of the responses yet).

[Douglas G. Brown]

I first heard this while I was in 5th or 6th grade, which is 1961- 1962. My grandmother would occasionally recite it, as well as the Lizzie Borden quatrain. I heard it numerous times in school until I graduated. Always with L3 as Jerome stated.

State of Mainers like to mildly dump on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which this state seperated from in 1820, as the other half of the Missouri Compromise.

In my county (Waldo), probably half of the natives have some Mayflower ancestry. In Primary school, we learned that most of the Boston Brahmins were Johnnie come latelys, who came over in the great Puritan migration of the 1630's. I think the Cabots were in the paint business, and the Lowells were in textiles, but they were both old money by 1900 or so. So, this verse got drilled into our little heads early on. I don't recall it as a song lyric, mainly because I paid little attention to folk songs,

But, by the time I was in junior high school, I realized that Mayflower ancestry and ten cents would buy a person a cup of coffee. Plenty of the poor relatives of the Brahmins have been packed off to Maine over the centuries, too. Delanos who live in trailers, Coffins who are carpenters, and the like.

I've seen it in numerous anthologies over the years; but most anthologies I look at were published prior to 1970. I'm surprised that it is known by so many of the respondents here. I always thought it merely New England thing.

Another nice New England poem is the "Wants of Man", by President John Quincy Adams ( I think ... perhaps it was his father).

Anyway, it will be fun to see a treatment of the Cabot-Lowell verse in Light

[Douglas G. Brown]

I just looked it up in my 1941 edition of Carolyn Wells' The Book of Humorous Verse (which I regard as sort of the mother of anthologies of comic verse.)

It's on page 947, under the title of ON THE ARISTOCRACY OF HARVARD, anthored by Dr. Samuel G Bushnell.

I come from good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod;
Where the Cabots speak only to Lowells,
And the Lowells speak only to God!

I suspect there are several variations out there.

I think it was also in a thick high school history book, The American Pageant, by Thomas Bailey, used in the late 1960s. And, undoubtedly, in back issues of American Heritage magazine

[Wendy Sloan]

I've heard it.
No idea where or when.