The Shooting of Dan McGrew

Canada had a famous gold rush and the town of Klondike was the centre of it. Robert Service was a bank teller in town who entertained the miners at night reciting poetry. 

The Shooting of Dan McGrew

Robert Service

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up 1
In the Malamute saloon;

The kid that handles the music-box 
Was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, 
Sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, 
The lady that's known as Lou. 

When out of the night, which was fifty below,  2
And into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, 
Dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave 
And scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, 
And he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, 
Though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink 
Was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, 3
And hold them hard like a spell;
And such was he, and he looked to me 
Like a man who had lived in hell;
With a face most hair, and the dreary stare 
Of a dog whose day is done,
As he watered the green stuff in his glass, 
And the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, 
And wondering what he'd do,
And I turned my head -- and there watching him
Was the lady that's known as Lou.

His eyes went rubbering round the room,  4
And he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell 
In the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; 
There was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, 
And flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt 
He sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands -- 
My God! but that man could play.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone,  5
When the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in 
With a silence you most could HEAR;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, 
And you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, 
Clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red,
The North Lights swept in bars? --
Then you've a haunch what the music meant . . .
Hunger and night and the stars.

And hunger not of the belly kind,  6
That's banished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing hunger of lonely men 
For a home and all that it means;
For a fireside far from the cares that are, 
Four walls and a roof above;
But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, 
And crowned with a woman's love --
A woman dearer than all the world, 
And true as Heaven is true --
(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, --
The lady that's known as Lou.)

Then on a sudden the music changed,  7
So soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean
Of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved; 
That her love was a devil's lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you 
Was to crawl away and die.
'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair,
And it thrilled you through and through --
"I guess I'll make it a spread misere," 
Said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

The music almost died away . . .  8
Then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," 
And my eyes were blind with blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, 
And it stung like a frozen lash,
And the lust awoke to kill, to kill . . .
Then the music stopped with a crash,
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned 
In a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt 
He sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in in a kind of grin,
And he spoke, and his voice was calm,
And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, 
And none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight,
And I'll bet my poke they're true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . 
and that one is Dan McGrew."

Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, 9
And two guns blazed in the dark,
And a woman screamed, and the lights went up,
And two men lay stiff and stark.
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, 
Was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast
Of the lady that's known as Lou.

These are the simple facts of the case, 10
And I guess I ought to know.
They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch",
And I'm not denying it's so.
I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, 
But strictly between us two --
The woman that kissed him and -- pinched his poke --
Was the lady that's known as Lou.

A quick lesson in poetry rhythm can be found here. Important to know that words have beats and how the beats are emphasized creates a rhythm.

1. This poem has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, 14 syllables a line (posting the poem above I divided the lines into 2). How a poem chooses to stress and destress syllables is referred to as a foot.  This style of unstressed and stressed is call iambic. The poem has 7 of these foots in a line, and the feet in a line is called a meter (only in poetry!). Hepta is greek for 7 so this poem is an iambic heptameter, sometimes called a fourteener (because of the 14 syllables a line). This is exactly the style that Aerosmith used for their hit song Walk this Way.

So, question one. Open the music below,  wait for the intro to play, and sing 2 stanzas of the poem above to the music below.

click here to open music in new window