03. PATEROLLER 2:50
Songwriter/Author: Traditional - Arr. by THE EH
Publishing: THE EBONY HILLBILLIES MUSIC INC

Patroller or paddyroller is old black dialect for patroller. These paterollers were poor whites of Irish descent who were enlisted by slave owners to regulate and round up “wayward” slaves in the American mountain south. They often whipped black males who had gone off plantation to visit their families from whom which they had been forcibly separated. Patrollers were regarded as more merciless task masters than the slaveholders themselves. They went about the countryside hunting slaves “just like dogs hunting rabbits” according to eye witness accounts of the time.