Hi, I never make actual posts, so please forgive me if I don’t do this properly.
I have posted this in a few relevant subs, in hopes of getting more responses. I hope that is allowed.
I was raised by my grandpa. He was in the navy, during the Vietnam war. I know he served on riverboats. He passed away recently to cancer.
During one of our last conversations, I asked what his all time favorite songs were, so I could write them all down. One of the first ones he mentioned, was something he said they’d do over in Vietnam during the war, called “Poor Old 33”. That’s all he could remember, as he was heavily medicated.
After he passed away, I talked to a relative, an army veteran, and he said that would likely be a cadence? I really am ignorant when it comes to anything of this nature, so I’m not even completely sure what that means. But I thought it might be worth including here.
I have spent weeks looking high and low for this song. It was important enough to him to mention to me before his passing, so I must find it.
Can anyone please help me, or at least point me in the right direction? I thought it would be worth a shot. Thank you.
Looking at your posts in other subreddits, you've gotten some good responses; I'd agree it's a good starting point to assume that it might be a cadence, but that's hard to pin down.
The one thing I'd emphasize is a lot of cadence and local greetings are extremely unit oriented and often unintelligible outside of them at a specific time and place. I'll give an example: I once tried to try to get an Army armor friend to interpret some dialogue that was outright alien to me from 2014's Fort Bliss (incidentally, a terrific, criminally underwatched movie), and the best they could come up with is that 'yeah, that must have been directly lifted from something the writer picked up while walking around base' since they were equally confused despite being fluent in tanker 'language'.
An example of this is the Stockade Shuffle demonstrated in 1990's Cadence; that's a real thing with some apparent history that may very well date back to the US Colored Troops in the Buffalo Soldier days. If it hadn't been apparently written about in the 1968 book used for the screenplay, Count a Lonely Cadence, though, it's something that you'd otherwise have a really difficult time tracking down since your only source is individual memoirs. Another example is cartoonist Jake Schuffert's work during the Berlin Airlift; if there weren't multiple books and oral histories available to provide context, trying to figure out many of them would be nigh impossible nowadays.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any Brown Water Navy collections - I'm presuming if it's related to cadence he probably wasn't on a carrier or destroyer - that contain similar calls like the Army Study guide that you've received, but that's not definitive either; My Girl's a Vegetable isn't in there either, and I know for a fact that one's been around for decades in multiple services, even if it may now have fallen out of good favor.
The best I can offer is that your best approach may be to start doing what we do here - chase footnotes, possibly some on cadences if you can find more academic work on it, but more likely from individual memoirs and oral histories. Particularly valuable would be finding a unit history of whatever he was in and see if anyone else remembers what he's talking about. Another option might be to see if there are any resources maintained by Navy Bandmasters or other arcane ratings on cadences; you can often turn up strange military resources if you search deeply enough. Last, many local units often published informal weekly-ish newspapers, and if you can find them (which can be very difficult) those can really point you in the right direction.
Good luck!