This song was written by my father, Yvor Smitter. He used to sing it to me when I was a little girl and when I was a teenager after Leila divorced him and he was living in California, working as a geologist for the California Division of Mines and Geology, he sent me a copy of the song on a record he had recorded. In this recording someone else is singing the tune, but I have a different recording on another record with Yvor playing the harmonica. I'll try to figure out how to upload that version as a recording on youtube. Victoria uploaded this recording and copied in photos of Yvor that I have in my Facebook albums. He was a kind and gentle man, playful and adventurous. He loved boyish tricks and as a geologist he easily got his hands on explosives used in mining the California hills. I was told this story by his old friend, James Holwerda: one afternoon Yvor drove out into the hills of the Sierra Nevada forest in his pickup truck. He stopped on the side of a quiet track, heaved a box of dynamite out of the back and walked into the forest. He found a tall pine tree and taking the dynamite out of the box, he strung several sticks round the base of its trunk. He rolled out a long, long length of fuse, lit the end then waited. Kaboom! The tree shot into the sky like a rocket, turned and then plumetted like an arrow back into the ground. I can just hear him say, "That was mighty fun" or "Boom! It made a mighty big noise". When I was seventeen I went to California and saw him again for the first time since I was eleven. He took several shot gun shells from his rifle, emptied the gunpowder into a pipe and buried it in the road outside his little apartment building. Again, just for fun, he lit the fuse and we waited for the explosion. He found such simple pleasure in the loud Bang! and in seeing how big a hole it would make. Six weeks later he died. Funny ol' Daddoo. I miss him and wish he could have met you children. I'm glad though that you can get to know a glimmer of him through this little song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5n1c8ThvNE
