"The Little Old Sod Shanty On The Claim" is an American folk song of unknown authorship (although one account claims it was written by Josiah C. Pickering of Beadle County, South Dakota). It appeared somewhere around 1880 published in several American newspapers. The printings suggested that it be sung to the tune of "The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane

The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane

"The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane" is a popular song written by Will S. Hays in 1871 for the minstrel trade. Written in dialect, the song tells of an elderly man, presumably a slave or former slave, passing his latter years in a broken-down old log cabin...

" written by Will Hays in 1871. The song tells of the trials of homesteading on the Great Plains

Great Plains

The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S...

 and became immensely popular among the settlers. The title comes from variations of a refrain found in the verses and the chorus:

... my little old sod shanty on my claim.

Jack Thorp published a version of the song in his 1908 book, Songs of the Cowboys, titled "Little Adobe Casa" which he attributed to a Tom Beasley written in 1887.

"The Little Old Sod Shanty On The Claim" has been performed and recorded numerous times. Slim Wilson

Slim Wilson

Clyde Carol Wilson , better known as Slim Wilson, was an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, and radio and TV personality who was a cornerstone of country music in the Ozarks for more than 50 years beginning in the 1930s; both in his own right, and as a member of The Goodwill Family and The...

's December 1936 recording of the song is part of the Traditional Music and Spoken Word Catalog of the American Folklife Center

American Folklife Center

The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife" . The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the Library in 1928 as a repository for American folk music...

 at the Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

.