allad sheets were a significant line for most cheap-print publishers. In a field that was called “cheap print” for a reason, de Marsan was one of the lowest practitioners: technically, his printing is slipshod at best, typified by uneven impressions; the paper is usually very poor. The grayish, indistinct tone of this ballad accurately reproduces the look of de Marsan’s work. De Marsan's ballad-sheet house style was based on crude but attractively bold pictorial border elements. With the sloppiness typical of the work produced by his house, an editor’s notation on the copy of a different ballad telling the pressman which border should be used was set in type by the compositor—allowing us to know this border (although showing a variety of theatrical figures) was called “The Clown.”

THE OLD CABIN HOME is a minstrel song from 1857; it remained quite popular into the 1880s—and deservedly so: its rollicking tune is both enjoyable to sing and fun to hear. As was mentioned in the notes to LISTEN TO THE MOCKING BIRD, the combination of a very sad text with a very jolly tune was a distinctive feature of many minstrel songs. The last verse of the ballad has a line that doesn't belong ("Close by the side of the Old Cabin Home"); where this error crept in is unknown, but it is reproduced on many ballad sheets produced by different publishers—evidence that they were copying each other's sheets.
The principal use of ballad sheets was, of course, to learn and/or sing songs from; then as now, not everyone had a good memory. Ballad sheets allowed purchasers to either learn a song in the privacy of their own chambers (or tent) and then spring it on the rest of the crowd at an after-dinner social gathering, the oyster rooms, or around the camp-fire; or to just sing the song with sheet in hand to help a defective memory (in the Irish tradition, when a singer gets stuck in the middle of a song, we say "there's a hole in the ballad"!).

But these sheets also had an important secondary use: they were cheap decor. While especially true of illustrated ballads (like this one), even sheets with nothing but words were pasted or pinned up in public and private rooms as mirthful or improving decoration. Mr. M'Dermott has seen ballad sheets pasted inside trunk lids, books, instrument cases, portfolios and such; doubtless they were stuck up in winter quarters, and they might well have been pasted inside the odd knapsack. Other locations for this item, folded up, are in the corner of a knapsack, stuck into the sweatband of your cap or hat, or in the wallet. They have served as impromptu letter paper when nothing better was to hand, and can again. While these ballad sheets are quintessential ephemera—cheap when bought, and not likely to survive very long—Mr. M'Dermott has been lucky enough over the years to see two examples of what mid-19C purchasers did to keep their prized clutch of ballads handy: one sheaf was pinned with a straight pin along the long side; another had been sewn together with thread, like a side-sewn pamphlet: a  home-made "song book."