Johnny, Fill Up the Bowl is a parody of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. The best-known version describes the events of the American Civil War. As a shanty, it is included in Eckstorm and Smyth's Minstrelsy of Maine (1927), where a fragment was contributed by 92-year-old Captain Rufus H. Young of Hancock Maine in 1925. Young said "it was a very favorite chantey for getting under way; lots of it... upward of forty or fifty verses and very much sung".
Young's recollection, however, was that it told the story of a bashful boy who went to talk, and eventually proposed, to a girl who sat by the fireside chewing gum. At any rate, the events show how nearly any popular song, especially a march, might be transformed into a work song.