The fight in Muddy Hole

On his most recent CD, ‘Black and White’, English Harbour West’s Bud Davidge sings a rendition of the song, ‘The Fight in Muddy Hole’, that the late Jerry Fudge wrote about a fierce row that happened in his hometown.

“Well, my father didn’t really write that song,” Jerry’s oldest son, Jim, a retired fisheries officer, corrected me as we sat in the lovely McCallum home that he shares with his wife, Elsie (Poole).  “Because, nobody really ‘wrote’ songs in those days – most of them didn’t know how to write.  They would just make up the words and the music, remember them, and then sing them.  And if somebody else wanted to remember them and sing them, that was good. 

“My father knew more than three hundred songs, but they were all in his head.  And some were his, and some he got from other people.  So while my father made ‘The Fight in Muddy Hole’ one of his songs, it wasn’t just his.  No, ‘The Fight in Muddy Hole’ was George Simms’ song before it was my father’s (A matter that Davidge explores in the cover notes of his CD, too).  But my father kept that song going.

“I know almost all the people mentioned in that song.  The Uncle Bob Morris they sing about was my godfather and he was ‘a very good man’, like the song says.  Even though he didn’t have too many nice things to say about the Orange Lodge,” Jim laughs, at the song’s reference to the anti-Catholic group that found its way to Newfoundland and Canada, from Ireland, in the 1800’s.  “The only people I don’t know in that song are the Amber brothers, George and Jack.  I’d heard their names before, but I was too young to remember them.   

“And I’m not trying to be contrary,” Jim, always a gentleman, wants me to know, “but my father didn’t come from Muddy Hole.  No, he was born in Cape La Hune in 1906.  Cape La Hune is that big junk of land you can see on a lovely day when you are on the ferry coming out of Hermitage Bay, looking west.  It’s that big piece of land the Marine Voyageur has to go around when she travels from Francois to Grey River and Burgeo.

“Then my father left Cape La Hune for Penguins Island where he was lighthouse keeper for eighteen years.  And somewhere in that time he moved to Muddy Hole with my mother (Elizabeth Wells) after he lost the front half of his feet from frostbite, in a shipwreck.  His boots filled up with water when he reached out to help another man, and in the wintertime, that’s not good when your boots fill up with water, is it?  But it didn’t stop him.  After he lost the front part of his feet he just stuffed the toes of his boots with rags, and went on like nothing had happened to him. 

“Anyway, Bud Davidge sings ‘The Fight in Muddy Hole’ exactly the way my father did.  He does a great job.  I recognized it right away, and it made me smile when I heard it.  Because, yes sir, ‘The Fight in Muddy Hole’ was one of my father’s songs, and now Bud Davidge is keeping it going for my father… and for George Simms.”

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McCallum’s feller-from-away, David Ward can be reached at davidward385@gmail.com or at Box #3, McCallum, Newfoundland, A0H 2J0.