“The old folks show the young folks just what to do”

The line “The old folks show the young folks just what to do” is a lyric from a Sara Tidwell song that turns a puzzle about the Devore family’s generations into a question of inherited conduct. When Michael Noonan recalls it while examining Johanna Noonan’s papers, it suggests that the past’s influence was not merely familial or chronological: older people had shown younger people how to act, though what they had done remains unanswered at this point.

The lyric and the generational puzzle

Michael encounters the song in the course of looking through photocopied newspaper clippings about Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. The clippings include an 1865 notice about Jared Devore, then thirty-two, whose return had helped Michael notice a mismatch in the generations he was trying to understand. He works out that Jared would have been sixty-seven or sixty-eight by the time Sara and the Red-Tops arrived in Castle County and settled at what became Tidwell’s Meadow: old, but still hale, and a Civil War veteran whom younger men might have looked up to.

That calculation gives the lyric a pointed application. Michael takes it to mean that the older generation had shown the younger one what to do. But the realization sharpens the mystery rather than resolving it: he asks what, exactly, they had done, and the clippings about Sara and the Red-Tops do not supply an answer.

Historical context and irony

The line carries a darker force beside the contemporary newspaper descriptions of the Black performers. The clippings call the Red-Tops “our Southern blackbirds” and “our rhythmic darkies,” and describe them as “full of dusky good-nature.” Sara is presented through a condescending racialized portrait that reduces her to physical features and supposedly “animal” exuberance. The genial tone of these accounts is inseparable from their contempt.

Against that record, a song about elders teaching the young becomes more than a general observation about generations. It points toward an unwritten transmission of behavior within a society whose public accounts are already compromised by racial hierarchy. The evidence does not identify what Jared or any other older man taught the younger men, so the lyric remains an interpretive clue, not a complete disclosure. Its significance lies in how it makes the gap in the archive feel consequential: the newspapers preserve their patronizing descriptions, while the conduct behind Michael’s question remains obscured.