Monongahela Sal (Sung by Robert Schmertz, the copyright holder, at Pittsburgh, l947 and used by his permission. Recorded by Jacob A. Evanson.)
For some years past, people have asked me, "Do you know 'Monongahela Sal'?" I finally caught up with the man who made it, Robert Schmertz, an architect and a member of the faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology.
"I'm nuts about hillbilly," said Schmertz. "Years ago somebody left a long-neck banjo at my house. I don't know anything about music, but I figured out how to play a few chords on it, and I've been making up songs ever since."
These songs were made to be rendered tongue-in-cheek, as it were, and Schmertz sings them with a straight face. He plays the banjo in perfectly steady rhythm but sings the melody with such free and intricate rhythms and pitches that only by writing out each stanza can justice be done. Only the basic melodic structure, which is a variant of "Red River Valley", is given here, together with the rolling chorus-tune and a special tune for stanza 8. I have included all stanzas and choruses of the long narrative song, which is in the rootin'-tootin'-shootin' "he done her wrong" tradition. Schmertz has a grand sense of the place names of this region that "roll on the tongue with venison richness": Monongahela, Monessen, Ohio, Aliquippa (Alliquippi for a rhyme with Mississippi), Emsworth, Sewickley.