Friday breakfast is bacon and eggs. This Friday as I cooked the bacon and Dad waited for his breakfast he asked me if I knew the song that went “bacon sizzling in the pan” Not much to go on so he started talking…

“It was a song lots of people sang on the farm. It was popular on the radio. I remember Alberta Slim was on the radio quit often. We only had the one radio. It was in the house and mostly tuned to farm programs and they played a lot of country music. Back then people sang to entertain themselves, the girls, Mom hanging laundry, Dad out on the tractor. They didn’t take the TV to the field in those days. Sometimes you could even hear the hired girl, must have been at least a ¼ mile away, singing at the top of her lungs. “

Well we couldn’t let it go. We had to find out more, so out came my laptop. After a brief search of Youtube I found the it. “Bacon sizzling in the pan” is a line from the song “When the bloom is on the sage” and was recorded by a number of artists including Burl Ives but the one Dad thought was “the one” was sung by Gene Autry. Here’s a link, listen or sing along and imagine you are back on the farm on the Saskatchewan prairie.

When The Bloom Is On The Sage (When It’s Round-Up Time In Texas) – YouTube

Lyrics:

To most folks there’s a spot that lives forever
Deep down within their fondest memory
Tho I have been a rover I have never
Seen any place where I would rather be

Chorus:

When it’s round up time in Texas
And the bloom is on the sage
Then I long to be in Texas
Back a ridin’ on the range
Just to smell the bacon fryin’
When it’s sizzlin’ in the pan
Hear the breakfast horn in the early morn
Drinkin’ coffee from a can

Just a-ridin’, rockin’, ropin’
Poundin’ leather all day long
Just a-swayin’, sweatin’, swearin’
Listenin’ to a cowhand’s song
How it beckons, and I reckon
I would work for any wage
To be free again, just to be again
Where the bloom is on sage

Chorus 2:

When it’s roundup time in Texas
And the bloom is on the sage
Then I long to be in Texas
Back a-ridin’ on the range
Where the purple hills are callin’
Callin’ to me from afar
To come back again to the Rio Grande
And the lonely Texas star

How I’m longin’ to be livin’
Where the prairie flowers grow
I’d be willin’ to start walkin’
To the land that I love so
How it beckons, and I reckon
I would work for any wage
To be free again, just to be again
Where the bloom is on the sage

By the way Wikipedia says Alberta Slim was Canadian country singer popular in the west back in the 1940s mostly. He broadcast out of Regina and Saskatoon.